In a digital world saturated with manipulated media and synthetic imagery, trust is no longer a given. Photojournalist David Butow has spent his career documenting real events — from the war in Iraq to protests in Washington — and he’s now at the forefront of a growing movement: making digital images verifiable at the source.
“Even reality needs proof now,” David says. “The risk isn’t just that people believe fake images — it’s that they stop believing real ones.”
In episode 11 of Exponential, we explore the promise and friction of C2PA, an emerging standard for content provenance that embeds cryptographic proof directly into digital files.
Making a manifest
C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) creates a machine-verifiable manifest at the moment a photo is taken. Unlike traditional metadata, this manifest can’t be easily stripped or edited — it travels with the image as a durable signature of origin.
David was an early adopter of a C2PA-enabled Leica M11-P, which signs every photo at capture using an encrypted chip inside the camera. That signature — if preserved — becomes a long-term reference point for truth.
“You might take a photo today that no one questions. But in ten years, that proof could matter,” he says. “Having the original cryptographic record is powerful.”
A standard for the next era of truth
With generative AI flooding the internet with synthetic media, tools for verification are no longer optional. They’re essential.
“You can’t stop fake images from being created,” David says. “But you can give people a way to prove what’s real.”
The future of verifiable media won’t be built by software alone. It will take hardware, standards, publishing workflows — and people who care about truth enough to build for it.
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