Provenance

Provenance is the digital paper trail: where a piece of content came from, who or what created it, and what happened to it on the way here. Technical standards can attach tamper-evident records to an image, showing that a particular device captured it or that an edit was made. Useful, because our old method, squinting at the pixels and announcing ‘that hand looks funny’, is not a sustainable verification system. But provenance is not a little golden badge marked TRUE. A perfectly traceable photograph can still be misleading, cruelly framed or attached to a rotten argument. The trace answers the first question, where did this come from; human judgement must answer the rest. As generated material gets harder to spot by appearance, provenance becomes part of ordinary due diligence, while trust still belongs to people willing to put their names near the history and answer for what it shows.