Sora: if video can be false, what is truth then?

Generated video as authentic proof that no authentication exists anymore.

OpenAI launched Sora. It generates video. Not clips from existing footage. Truly generated, pixel by pixel, video of things that don't exist. A woman in Paris. A robot making sushi. A dinosaur in Times Square. It looks real. It has grain. It has light. The movement is natural. It's all artificial.

This happened faster than I expected. Just over a year ago, deepfake artists still manually fabricated photos by pasting faces. Now algorithms generate billions of pixels of complete scenes in seconds.

The implication unfolds. Video is no longer proof. A photograph is no longer authentic. "I was there, see?" doesn't work anymore. Because "there" can be artificially generated.

This reaches beyond entertainment. It touches legal truth. Journalistic integrity. Historical archive. If Sora generates a video that looks like yesterday's news, how do you know what's real?

The answer is: you don't. Unless you have chain of custody. Unless you know where the video came from. What recording system was used. With what metadata.

Metadata. That's the next frontier. Every real video has metadata: exif data, camera information, timing. Generated video has fake metadata, or no metadata. So you can verify. For now.

But generation follows metadata closely. Sora will tomorrow generate perfect metadata. Then you need authentication. Watermarks. Digital signatures. Blockchain registration of original video.

This brings me back to iRecord. Identity works now the same as video. You can say "I'm Jacob Huibers," and nobody knows if it's really you. You can spoof yourself. You can use deep voice. You can create fake video.

That's why iRecord bets on biometrics. Your finger. Your face. This is harder to spoof. Not impossible. But harder. And it stays local. I control it. Not Google. Not the government. The verification happens on my phone. With my data.

Sora makes authentication urgent. Now that video is no longer proof, identity must be much stronger.

What interests me is what this means for legislation. European legal systems are built on physical evidence. Writing. Signatures. Witness statements. Now that's all digital, and digital can be fake, what then?

The answer is probably: we rebuild. We'll need systems that don't trust what we see, but trust what we can verify. Chain of custody at digital level. Where does this come from? Who created it? When? With what machine? Signed with what private key?

This isn't science fiction. This is preparation for what Sora already can do, and what other models will soon do.

Sources: OpenAI Sora technical documentation (2024); MIT Media Lab deepfakes and forensics research; LaTurbo Avedon, 'Reality Bites' (digital artist essay, 2023); NIST on digital forensics standards