What happens when images no longer need to be real, but still demand authority? When the BBC, the State Department, or Apple publishes an AI-generated image, viewers trust it. The label saying “AI-generated” doesn’t change that. If anything, the label reinforces trust – it shows the institution isn’t hiding anything.Continue Reading
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority escalated its investigation of the Getty Images-Shutterstock merger to Phase 2 on November 3, 2025, citing concerns about “substantial lessening of competition” and potential for “higher prices” and “lower quality” content for news publishers. Three weeks later, Getty CEO Craig Peters told the FinancialContinue Reading
The End of Visual Evidence It’s a few years from now. A photo surfaces of something that matters: a protest, an accident, a natural disaster. You watch it. You feel something. You assume it’s fake. You scroll past. The photograph might be real. Someone might have captured a genuine momentContinue Reading
AI Everywhere, But Not All the Time Every October in San Francisco, where robot taxis are busily roaming the streets, something peculiar happens. The photography industry’s old guard—print manufacturers, stock agencies, software makers—sits down with its new blood: the brilliant engineers building AI-powered photo services, mobile apps, editing tools, andContinue Reading
The industry finally stopped theorizing and started building the infrastructure to preserve truth itself We’ve reached the inflection point. Not the one we’ll read about in retrospect, but the one happening right now—where the exponential flood of AI-generated content threatens to drown out any meaningful signal of authenticity. The WorldContinue Reading
When Content Trust Becomes a Strategic Asset There was a time when an image’s value was judged by its beauty, originality, or timeliness. Today, a growing portion of its value rests on something far more fundamental: whether we can believe it. From AI‑generated product shots slipping into online catalogs, toContinue Reading
As the EU AI Act’s obligations for general-purpose AI models take effect, the age of opaque training data and untraceable outputs is drawing to a close. The Shifting Sands of AI Regulation The era of unregulated AI development is coming to an end, at least in Europe. As generative AIContinue Reading
As generative AI continues to infiltrate everything from smartphone cameras to image editors, one deceptively simple question remains unresolved and increasingly urgent: How much AI involvement is enough to call something AI-generated? It is not just a technical question or a legalContinue Reading
Six years ago, a group of concerned publishers and a formidable creative software company, well-versed in the manipulation of digital content, joined forces to develop what may be the most important and underestimated standard of this generation. Ironically, this was before the rise of Generative AI. Since then, three summitsContinue Reading
Copyright is a Pillar of Provenance Copyright isn’t just a legal mechanism—it’s also a system of traceability. When a piece of content is protected by copyright: Its origin is clear (who created it, when, and under what rights). Its chain of custody can often be reconstructed (via licenses, credits, metadata,Continue Reading