Reality Foundation
We study the boundaries between authentic and synthetic media — and build the academic infrastructure to defend them. Our work underpins the tools, policies, and standards needed to restore trust in visual evidence.
The proliferation of generative AI has made it trivially easy to fabricate images, documents, and video. Legal systems, journalism, and democratic processes depend on the integrity of evidence — a dependency that is now under attack.
The Problem
Deepfakes, synthetic media, and AI-generated imagery are indistinguishable from authentic records. Courts, journalists, and ordinary people have no reliable mechanism to verify what they see.
The Gap
Industry-led detection tools exist, but they lack independent verification, peer review, and the permanence required for legal or archival use. Independent academic research is missing.
Our Response
We research cryptographic timestamping, NFT-based provenance records, and immutable ledger architectures as tools to establish unambiguous chains of authenticity.
Long term
Reality Foundation will serve as the independent scientific counterpart to RealityCheck — providing peer-reviewed methodology, published datasets, and policy recommendations.
Four interlocking areas that together address the challenge of maintaining verifiable reality.
Theme 01
Defining what cryptographic and physical evidence constitutes proof that a digital asset was captured, not generated.
Theme 02
Evaluating blockchain-based timestamp mechanisms for evidentiary integrity across legal and journalistic contexts.
Theme 03
Studying how manipulated imagery enters insurance claims processes and how provenance records can prevent it.
Theme 04
Developing open methodologies for detecting and attributing synthetic media at a forensic standard of rigor.
European Context
The EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act, and the forthcoming Media Authenticity Regulation are creating binding obligations around synthetic media transparency. Reality Foundation is positioned to provide the independent academic grounding these frameworks require — from methodology to evidence standards.
EU AI Act
Requires disclosure and watermarking of AI-generated content. Our research informs detection and verification methodology.
Digital Services Act
Mandates systemic risk assessments for synthetic media on large platforms. We provide independent academic benchmarks.
C2PA & Content Provenance
We study interoperability between blockchain provenance records and emerging open standards like C2PA and IPTC.
Get Involved
We are building a multidisciplinary research community. There is a role for every background.