Think of a photograph. The light is not great, the framing is slightly off, and something in the background is hard to make out. The person who took it was really there, pulled out a phone and captured the moment.
A few years ago, none of this would have needed much thought. A photo was simply a photo.
Today, seeing one question underneath it is hardly surprising:
“Is this AI?”
And the person asking is not necessarily being paranoid.
We can hear a familiar voice in an audio message without being completely sure the person actually said those words. A polished document, a convincing email or a realistic video no longer carries the same automatic trust it once did. Fraud and forgery are not new, of course. What has changed is how easy they are to produce and scale. INTERPOL has warned in its 2026 assessments that generative technologies are making impersonation and financial fraud easier to reproduce at scale.¹
What interests me more, though, is not how convincing the fake has become.
It is what that is doing to the real.
Suspicion is becoming normal
For a long time, we moved through the internet with a fairly simple habit: we treated what we saw as real until we had a reason not to.
That habit is starting to reverse.
When an unusual payment request arrives, confirming it through another channel no longer feels overly cautious. When a video is too striking, we check the source first. When a strange message comes from someone we know, the question “Did they really send this?” can appear almost automatically.
None of these behaviours is dramatic on its own. Put together, though, they suggest that our default position online is changing.
We used to look for a reason to doubt.
Now, increasingly, we look for a reason to trust.
The interesting part is that this does not only create problems for fake content. It places pressure on genuine content too. Being able to show where a real photograph, message or document came from is becoming more valuable.
In a sense, the burden of proof is moving.
A photograph may need a history
Standards such as C2PA and Content Credentials are trying to address exactly this problem. But there is an important distinction: they do not claim that a photograph “shows the truth.” They aim to provide verifiable information about where a file came from and what happened to it afterwards.²
That difference matters.
Technology cannot act as the final judge of truth itself.
A photograph can be completely authentic and still be used in a misleading context. A video may be untouched and still show only the thirty seconds that support one version of an event. Knowing its origin does not automatically tell us what to believe.
Still, we are beginning to get used to the idea that a photograph may come with a history. The continued development of the C2PA standard in 2026 is part of that broader effort to carry provenance information through more of the media ecosystem.³
Once you move past the technical language, the idea is slightly strange:
The photograph itself is beginning to carry something like a passport.
Where did it originate? What tool created it? Was it altered afterwards?
Only a few years ago, asking these questions about an ordinary photograph would have seemed excessive. Soon, they may become the simplest way to say, “Yes, I actually took this.”
Something similar is happening with identity. One of the ideas behind the European Union’s digital identity wallet is that people should be able to prove only what is necessary instead of handing over their entire identity for every transaction. For example, a person could prove that they meet an age requirement without revealing their full date of birth or address. The EU framework foresees member states offering at least one European Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026.⁴
That seems far more sensible to me than sending copies of identity cards all over the internet.
But it leads to another question:
How many things are we going to have to prove?
We have already spent years ticking little boxes to say that we are not robots. The possibility that this could become a more serious question of identity no longer feels quite as funny as it once did.
Proving that we are human is one thing. Linking everything we do online to our official identity is another.
We need security. We also need privacy, and sometimes the ability to remain anonymous.
The line between those things is likely to become much more important.
Proof is not the same as trust
This is where the problem stops being purely technological.
We can verify which device created a file. We can check whether a digital signature is valid. We can prove someone’s identity with more secure methods.
But trust is broader than any of those things.
A certificate cannot tell us how a company behaves when something goes wrong. A verification badge cannot explain why we have come to trust a particular publication over many years. A cryptographic record cannot tell us whether a person will stand behind what they said.
Technology may become very good at answering:
“Where did this really come from?”
The question “Should I trust it?” will still belong to us.
That may be why one of the most valuable things in the next phase of the internet will not be more content, but a credible history. What a person, institution or brand says today may matter less in isolation than how consistently those words match what they have done over time.
Because while images, voices and text are becoming easier to imitate, a coherent history is not becoming equally easy to fake.
The irony is that more advanced technology may push us back towards some very old habits.
Asking for the source. Confirming an important instruction through a second channel. Waiting before sharing something that looks almost too good to be true. Looking at what an institution has done in the past rather than only what it says today.
None of this is new. Perhaps that is exactly why it still works.
As fake things become cheaper to produce, proving what is real will become more valuable.
But no badge, identity wallet or technical standard will completely close the distance between something being real and something being trustworthy.
The hardest problem on the internet in the coming years may not be producing reality.
It may be recognising it when we see it.
Sources
1. INTERPOL — Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment 2026
2. C2PA — Content Credentials / Technical Specification
3. C2PA — Content Credentials 2.3
4. European Commission — European Digital Identity Wallet
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When humanity forgets how to feel, what is eternity for?
A dystopian science fiction novel about memory, identity, emotional suppression, and the cost of engineered perfection.
In a future where pain has been controlled, fear has been softened, and human emotion has been quietly redesigned in the name of order, one awakening begins to expose the truth hidden beneath the system.
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