RealityFoundation
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.
2025
Founded
4
Research themes
3
Founding members
🇪🇺
EU
Based in Europe
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.
Visual truth is eroding. 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.
No academic anchor. 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.
Blockchain-anchored provenance. We research cryptographic timestamping, NFT-based provenance records, and immutable ledger architectures as tools to establish unambiguous chains of authenticity.
Academic validation layer. RealityFoundation 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.
Defining what cryptographic and physical evidence constitutes proof that a digital asset was captured, not generated.
Evaluating blockchain-based timestamp mechanisms for evidentiary integrity across legal and journalistic contexts.
Studying how manipulated imagery enters insurance claims processes and how provenance records can prevent it.
Developing open methodologies for detecting and attributing synthetic media at a forensic standard of rigor.
The EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act, and the forthcoming Media Authenticity Regulation are creating binding obligations around synthetic media transparency. RealityFoundation is positioned to provide the independent academic grounding these frameworks require — from methodology to evidence standards.
Requires watermarking of AI-generated content. Our research informs verification methodology.
Mandates risk assessments for synthetic media on platforms. We provide independent benchmarks.
We study interoperability between blockchain 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.