Reality is losing the deepfake war

Support for Decoder comes from Adobe. Life is unpredictable, and that means you need your projects to adapt with whatever gets thrown at you. That means mastering the ability to pivot and collaborate with others to reach your goals. Adobe gets that, which is why they made a tool that's just as flexible as you are, PDF Spaces and Acrobat Studio. Your PDF files are no longer static. Instead, they're living documents that flex with you and your project's needs. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, we're gonna talk about reality and whether we can label photos and videos to protect our shared understanding of the world around us. No, really. We're we're gonna go there. It's a deep one. To do this, I'm gonna bring on Verge reporter, Jess Weatherbed, who covers creative tools like Photoshop and Canva for us. It's a space that's been totally upended by generative AI in a huge variety of ways with an equally huge number of responses from artists, creatives, and the people who consume all of that art and creative out in the world. Now if you've been listening to Decoder or my other show, The Vergecast, or even just reading The Verge over these past few years, you'll know that we've been talking about how the photos and videos taken by our phones are getting more and more processed and AI generated for years now. And now in 2026, we're in the middle of a full on reality crisis as fake and manipulated ultra believable images and videos flood onto social platforms at scale and without regard for responsibility or norms or even basic decency. The White House is sharing AI manipulated images of people getting arrested arrested and defiantly saying it simply won't stop when asked about it. We are just totally off the deep end now. Whenever we cover this stuff, I get the same question from a lot of different parts of our audience. Why isn't there a system to help people tell the real photos and videos apart from the fake ones? Some people even propose systems to us. And as it happens, Jess has actually spent a lot of time covering a few of these systems that exist in the real world. The most promising is something called c two p a. And her view is that so far, these systems have been almost entirely failures. In this episode, we're gonna focus on c two p a since it's the one that has the most momentum. It's a labeling initiative spearheaded by Adobe with buy in from some of the biggest players in the industry, including Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. But C2PA, which is also sometimes referred to as content credentials, has some pretty serious flaws. First, it was designed as more of a photography metadata standard, …