Authenticity After AI: Why Provenance Misses the Point
The question is not whether AI touched a work. The question is whether a human mind shaped it.
A photograph can be staged. A painting can be derivative. A song can be ghost-written. None of these require AI. Yet we obsess over AI provenance while ignoring the deeper crisis: a world flooded with work that looks creative but carries no genuine perspective.
The Provenance Trap
Watermarking tells you which tool was used. It cannot tell you whether the person using it had something real to say.
Consider two pieces of writing:
Which one is more authentic?
The Creative Fingerprint
What we should track is not whether AI was involved. We should track whether a genuine creative fingerprint is present.
Your fingerprint is not your style. It is not your technique. It is your perspective—the way you see what others miss, shaped by everything you have lived through.
The future of authenticity is not about proving human hands touched every pixel. It is about proving a human mind had something worth saying.
