Trustworthy synthetic visual media: Evidence across the media lifecycle

Zexi Jia, Zhiqiang Yuan, Jie Zhou, Jinchao Zhang

Images and videos have long helped people understand what happened and how a work came into being. Generative systems complicate that role. Realistic media can now be produced and revised without leaving a stable history, so appearance no longer reveals whether a scene was captured, synthesized, or altered along the way. Trust must instead come from evidence that explains the path an asset has taken and the circumstances in which it was used. Some of this evidence can be recovered from the media, while some must be recorded during production and preserved as the asset circulates. This review brings those approaches together and asks when their claims remain meaningful after ordinary processing or deliberate manipulation. We argue that trustworthy media do not depend on one universal marker of authenticity. The evidence must suit the question at hand, reach the person making the judgment, and remain open to correction when better information emerges. The larger goal is to keep the history of media intelligible even as the media itself continues to change.