Extract from Justin Tolman’s article “The Importance of Understanding Multimedia Provenance”
In today’s digital landscape, understanding the provenance of multimedia files is crucial for law enforcement, federal agencies, and corporations to ensure authenticity and trust in digital content. The manipulation of multimedia data has a long history, dating back to the 19th century. For instance, in 1869, William Mumler was accused of fraud for producing “spirit photographs” by double-exposing images to create ghostly apparitions. Over the last 150 years the tools have become more sophisticated and more accessible. With that accessibility bad actors are able to manipulate politics, business, and destroy reputations. In a recent podcast with Bertram Lyons, CEO of Medex Forensics, Lyons drives home the importance of understanding multimedia provenance data.
What Does Real Mean for Media Files?
Synthetic (or AI generated) media has quickly become almost impossible to differentiate from media that originated from a camera. Even the photographs we take with our phone cameras today are automatically heavily modified from color, to lighting, and even sometimes the content. Understanding the relationship between “original,” “real,” and “authentic” is crucial in the context of digital media provenance analysis. In our podcast, Lyons laid out some useful definitions for terms that we often use as synonyms, even though they are not:
