In this episode of the Plutopia News Network, Will Kreth—founder and CEO of HAND (Human and Digital) — joins Plutopians to discuss the future of identity, digital media, and the growing threat of deepfakes. Kreth, an early media pioneer and former first employee at Wired Magazine, outlines his mission to address the lack of source verification in a world where AI-generated fraud, such as unauthorized use of likeness and voice, is on the rise. He explains how HAND provides persistent, consent-based identity verification to help authenticate public figures and their AI-generated replicas. The conversation ranges from the early days of online media and metadata management to the implications of synthetic media, AI ethics, and cognitive overload in the post-internet age. Kreth emphasizes the need for robust identity frameworks, content provenance, and media literacy, drawing on examples from entertainment, technology, and cultural history to illustrate the urgent need for tools to preserve authenticity in a digitally manipulated world.

Will Kreth:

The threat of deepfakes is the number one thing that captures people’s attention. So, why does what I do matter – as a piece of the solution, of the provenance of the source verification, of the verifiable credentials of the individual? We provide a free to search and match, persistent, no-expiration-date unique [ID standard] to identify the [media] object – the person, and then a parent-child relationship to their replica — [created] with their consent. So, while there are many companies who’ve raised quite a lot of money to use AI to detect deepfakes, there are fewer companies engaged in the necessary work around source [provenance] verification — of what is real, and what is [created] with consent. In a world where fraudsters and scam artists and others have been appropriating, if not fully stealing, people’s name, image, and likeness (their NIL), their name, version, and [likeness], and sometimes their voice, which is even a more scary and dangerous area.