Things that never happened?

Internet got a wake-up call with the pope in  a $3,500 Balenciaga puffer coat. Looking at the image you need a professional eye to tell this image was AI-generated by Midjourney by Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old construction worker from the Chicago.

How about video? Here's Tom Cruise hard at work, or maybe not.

This video by @deeptomcruise on TikTok.

Thing is, we used to have a shared reality. Something happened, or it didn't. Then we argued about why it happened. Socialism versus Capitalism, Human error versus Design fault, Evolution vs Divine intervention. We discussed how to make something happen more often, or how to make it never happen again.

We had a place to start - an image, a photograph, something shared.

This is all gone - there is no trust left in the world around us, outside of our immediate family and friends we meet in person and experience events with.

We will need a chain-of-trust and I believe blockchain & NFT technology will enable this. The photographer signs the original photograph into a blockchain, and as the image travels between news distribution and news outlets it is tracked in the chain.

The photographer is now the source of trust that the photograph has not been edited, aka Photoshop'ed. This is what Numbers Protocol is doing

Numbers Protocol is the asset-driven protocol to make digital media traceable and verifiable through its innovative process. By making digital media traceable and verifiable, we are able to address critical issues in the digital media space, namely misinformation, copyright and royalty distribution.

More about Numbers protocol on Medium

And then we could do something about this, which never happened..

And Salvador Dali is finally on Twitter...