Mounir Ibrahim is chief communications officer and head of public affairs for Truepic and a former Foreign Service officer with the United States Department of State.Eight years ago, I wrote that emerging technology used to authenticate images could help hold war criminals like Bashar al-Assad, then president of Syria, accountable. As a United States diplomat on the ground in Syria, I saw why verifying the authenticity of images mattered: people making consequential decisions needed evidence grounded in reality. Nearly a decade later, it is clear that AI is playing a growing role in decisions once made solely by humans. Whether we like it or not, we are living in a world in which AI systems make, or significantly influence, decisions ranging from drone strikes in a war zone to insurance claims about a car accident. Many of those decisions depend on visual evidence.Helen of Troy showed us that a face could launch a thousand ships. Today, I worry the person behind the face may not exist at all.Decisions of consequence must be grounded in reality. We cannot accept a “garbage in, garbage out” approach to AI decisioning. Such systems need to operate on authentic and verifiable visuals. Otherwise, we risk scaling fraud and chaos without any tether back to reality.A growing number of companies — including Truepic — are making image authentication technology available across smartphones, digital cameras, software, and editing platforms, with an open standard supporting…

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