Building the New Trust Layer Under Pressure: From Content to Chain of Custody
krishnan · x · 2026-08-27
As AI makes generating convincing content cheap, the article argues that our response cannot simply be teaching people to look more carefully. The fundamental shift is moving from trusting the content itself to verifying the chain behind it—who created it, what changed, and who approved it.
Standards like C2PA provide provenance infrastructure, but provenance is not truth. A cryptographically signed lie remains a lie. Therefore, the new trust layer must combine provenance, verified identity, institutional processes, and human judgment. The prediction is that within five years, high-stakes digital content without a verifiable chain of custody will be treated like an unsigned contract—interesting but not actionable.
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