Two glimmers of hope on the authenticity horizon
Years ago – decades ago -- I was a history major. In the years that followed, working in three major industry associations, I would often drift back into my love of history. But even though I spent many years as president of AIIM, working with many records managers, archivists, and document gurus, I don’t think I truly appreciated the unique role that records play in preserving our history for future generations – and until I dove into my research for Immigrant Secrets. Without guarantees of information authenticity, we have no records. And without records, we have no history.
I recently reread George Orwell’s 1984. One of the key precepts in his dystopia is the notion that the past is not immutable – that new “facts” can be created to substitute for old “facts” to create entirely new “memories” of the past, memories that can be endlessly manipulated to serve political interests. The Party slogan in 1984 captures the essence of the idea: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Of course, there is a difference between creating new “facts” out of thin air to drive make-believe conclusions and re-examining the past to better understand our history and learn from it. It is possible to both value the integrity of facts and records and realize that those in positions of privilege often skew the interpretation of those facts to serve their own interests. It is not always simple to hold these two seemingly conflicting ideas in our head at the same time – 1) facts are facts, but 2) subject to interpretation and re-interpretation – but I think it is the only way we can really learn from the past.
But everything begins with how facts are recorded, and how they are preserved. The massive explosion in the volume of information, consumer-based technologies to create fake news, photos, and videos, and ubiquitous social technologies that allow any lunatic to globally disseminate that fake information at the push of a button are all colliding to make preserving our history more challenging every day.
All of which raises the stakes to find examples and models of those who are working hard to accurately preserve our history and to build strategies to determine what is real and what is fake. Which brings me to two examples that give me hope that there are people out there who understand the importance of recording our history – and determining what is authentic before it becomes a record.
The first example is the important work being done by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial. In his introduction to the Museum’s 2022 annual report, Director Piotr M. A. Cywiński wrote:
Russia’s invasion of sovereign and independent Ukraine flagrantly violated the international guarantees granted to the state. The Kremlin’s rhetoric and aggression unequivocally ended the post‑war era in Europe, part of the world order resulting from the experience of the Second World War. This makes it imperative to have stable, inviolable reference points to redefine common spaces of security, peace, and democracy. One such absolute point of reference is still the evident and tragic experience of Auschwitz. Today we can all see and better understand how much we need memory, which is the key to planning our future.
The people at the Museum take their mission of preservation and remembrance seriously. Check out the Museum’s fine work. Listen to the careful documentation of the history of Auschwitz on their podcast. Just a few days after Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), a suggestion for a daily exercise that I find personally important. Follow the Museum on Twitter. Watch the photos published each day, memorializing a victim born on that day. I often pay particular attention to those whose ages match roughly up against those of my kids and grandkids. A tiny, tiny action, but one that I hope plays a small role in keeping the work of the Museum and the history it represents in front of people.
The second example is one that centers around an issue that has been a personal concern for quite some time – the seemingly inexorable consumerization of technologies that allow unscrupulous players to create fake information, photos, and videos. Coupled with powerful and unregulated social amplification, this flow of fake information challenges all our previous approaches to determine what is authentic – and what is not. Some of my past posts on this are here:
All the approaches I’ve read about to combat this fake information problem have taken this idea as a core assumption -- “How can we determine what is fake and label that?” When viewed from this framework, you inevitably come up against the challenge of how the pace of change for protective technologies can possibly keep ahead of the pace of change for abusive ones.
David Pogue’s segment on the CBS Sunday Morning Show highlighted an approach that offers promise – flip the problem on its head and focus on how you demonstrate that information is authentic rather than how you prove it is fake. This is an approach pioneered by Adobe and Microsoft, and its objective is to essentially create a lie detector for fake information.
The idea is to establish a “Content Credential” for authentic information. Think of it as a small “i” in the corner of an image that would provide the history of how an image has been altered over time. Per the Adobe website:
Content Credentials (Beta) is a developing feature in Adobe Photoshop for creators to add their attribution details to their exported images. When enabled, Content Credentials gathers details such as edits, activity, and producer name then binds the information to the image as tamper-evident attribution and history data (called Content Credentials) when creators export their final content.
This feature aligns with the C2PA standard to provide digital provenance across the internet (beyond just Adobe products). It creates an open format for sharing information about the producer’s identity and the ingredients and tools used to make the content. These ultimately provide useful attribution information for audiences once the producer shares or publishes the image.
Content Credentials (Beta) is part of a growing ecosystem of technologies available through the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). Adobe and our 800+ CAI members are dedicated to restoring trust online by creating a standard way to share visual content without losing key contextual details such as who made it, when, and how. Alongside the CAI, Adobe also co-founded a standards development organization, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), to develop an open, global standard for sharing this information across platforms and sites.
Two glimmers of hope in a challenging information authenticity future. What approaches have you seen that give you hope?
The image I used for this post was created by the DALL-E 2 AI engine, a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.
My prompt was, “Create a photo about news in a subway setting.”
.Meanwhile, registration is now open for MER 2023. Make your plans NOW.
And don’t forget this post - 11 Key Information Governance Trends