Our Shared Reality Is at Stake. Is a Digital AI Watermark the Answer?
I've spent my career at the intersection of information and reality. For years, my work at Twipe was about building the digital "vessels" for the news. We created the mobile apps that delivered content from major newspaper publishers to millions of screens. My company's job was not to make the news, but to ensure its effective distribution.
Through that work, I had a front-row seat to the modern media landscape. I was not in the newsroom, but I was in the conference halls, looking at the business models. I saw an industry struggling with the erosion of public trust and news avoidance. I saw how the relentless business incentives for clicks and engagement often clashed with the higher mission for truth.
Today, as the founder of Anima Studios AI, I am no longer just distributing content. I am in the business of creating realities. We use generative AI to make advertisements, short films, and explore entirely new formats for storytelling. This shift has given me a new, urgent perspective on the very nature of truth.
Let's be honest, the system of 'truth' was already deeply flawed before generative AI. We cannot be purely nostalgic for an age when media institutions were perfect guardians of reality. They never were.
I watched as many in the industry, pressed by failing business models, chased metrics and embraced clickbait.
We have all seen once-trusted institutions fall into propaganda traps or suffer public scandals that shattered their credibility like the recent debacle of BBC's journalism showing how easily reality can be manipulated even with traditional methods.
This is the crucial context. We are not introducing generative AI into a high-trust, healthy society. We are introducing it into a skeptical one. This existing cynicism is the tinder, and AI is the match.
The tools we are using at Anima Studios are no longer toys. The latest models from OpenAI, Kling, Google, and others have, in just the last few months, solved the key barriers to realism. They now generate scenes with synchronized audio, realistic human dialogue, and consistent characters who can appear across multiple shots.
This leap ends the 150-year-old "photographic contract," where we instinctively assumed a video was a record of an event. Now, it can be a pure fabrication of an idea.
The obvious fear is the "deepfake", a fake video that fools us. But the more profound, and more certain, danger is what we call the "Liar's Dividend."
This is the social and political power gained by a bad actor when nothing is believable.
In this new world, when a politician is caught on a real audio recording or a genuine video taking a bribe, they have a new, powerful defense:
“You can’t trust that. It’s just an AI generation. You can’t prove it.”
The mere possibility of the fake is all that is needed to destroy the power of the real. It is an acid bath for accountability. It validates our worst cynicism and makes a shared, verifiable reality impossible.
This is where my work today becomes so critical. At Anima Studios, we use these tools every day. We create compelling ads for brands, craft imaginative short films, and empower creators with a toolset that enhances storytelling in ways we could only dream of a year ago.
This is a powerful, legitimate, and transformative use of AI. It is a new paintbrush, not a weapon.
But for this new creative economy to thrive, it must be built on a foundation of trust. We cannot, and should not, operate in a world where our art is indistinguishable from a political deepfake. For our work to be celebrated as creation, it must be distinguishable from deception.
We cannot solve this with ethics committees or vague promises. We must start with a hard, technical, and non-negotiable first step: the universal adoption of content provenance standards.
We have the technology today. The C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) offers a secure "nutrition label" for digital media. Google DeepMind's SynthID provides a powerful way to invisibly watermark content directly at the point of generation.
The responsibility for this implementation is twofold.
First, it lies with the foundational models. The OpenAIs, Googles, and Metas as well as open-source models must embed this provenance data into every single image and video the instant it is generated. It cannot be an optional setting.
Second, it lies with the distribution platforms. The YouTubes, TikToks, Instagrams, and X's of the world must be engineered to read this data, display it clearly to the user ("This content was AI-generated"), and—most importantly—penalize content that has had its watermark maliciously stripped.
This simple, technical step creates a two-tiered system: Verified Content (which can be traced to its source) and Unverified Content.
This will not stop bad actors from trying. But it will give the public, and journalists, a powerful, frontline tool to differentiate.
A watermark will not fix our broken trust in institutions. It will not solve the flawed incentive models for news that I saw firsthand. But it will draw a clear line in the sand.
The 'Liar's Dividend' thrives on ambiguity, chaos, and doubt. Our first job as technologists, and our duty as responsible creators, is to build a foundation that provides, at the very least, a baseline of clarity.
My work at Anima Studios is about building the future of creativity. I believe that future can, and must, coexist with the truth.
About the series & the author
This article is part of an ongoing series exploring the monumental shift of generative AI across the creative industries—from business and philosophy to technology and storytelling. We’re challenging myths, unpacking value, and redefining what creativity means in this new era.
I’m Riccardo Fredro, founder of Anima Studios—where we fuse cutting‑edge AI with over a decade of storytelling, filmmaking, marketing, and sound design to craft visually stunning, emotionally resonant content. Through this series, I’ll share insights and actionable perspectives on how generative AI is transforming leadership, culture, and the creative economy.
Stay tuned for more — and let’s reimagine creativity together.
