Nilay Patel

And second, it's really been only half-heartedly adopted by a handful, but not nearly all, of the players you would need to make it work across the internet ecosystem.

We're at the point now where Adam Masseri, who runs Instagram, is publicly posting that the default should shift and that you should not trust images or videos the way that you maybe could before.

Think about that for one second.

That's a huge, pivotal shift in how society evaluates photos and videos.

And it's an idea I'm sure we're going to come back to a lot this year.

But we have to start with the idea that we can solve this problem with metadata and labels, that we can label our way into a shared reality, and why that idea might simply never work.

Okay, Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed on C2PA and the effort to label our way into reality.

Here we go.

Jess Weatherbed, welcome to Decoder.

Hi.

I want to just set the stage.

Several years ago, I said to Jess, boy, these creator tools are criminally undercover.

Adobe as a company is criminally undercover.

Go figure out what's going on with Photoshop and Premiere and the creator economy because there's something there that's interesting.

And fast forward, here you are in Decoder today, and we're going to talk about whether you can label your way into consensus reality.

I just think it's important to say that's a weird turn of events.

The problem, broadly, is that there's an enormous amount of AI-generated content on the internet.

Much of it just depicts things that are flatly not real.

An important subset of that is there's a lot of content that depicts modifications to things that actually happened.

So our sense that we can just look at a video or a picture and sort of implicitly trust that it's true is fraying, if not completely gone.