Departmental Seminar: “Proof of Human: Provenance, Identity, and Trust in the Age of Generative Systems” – Professor Andrew Melchior

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Professor Andrew Melchior, CTO of Massive Attack and Founder of Genotone Ltd, will present a seminar entitled "Proof of Human: Provenance, Identity, and Trust in the Age of Generative Systems." Abstract: Generative systems have made it cheap to produce convincing artefacts whose origin, authorship and history may be difficult to establish. This creates a problem deeper than synthetic media: much of our digital infrastructure was built to move and reproduce information, not to preserve trustworthy evidence about where it came from or who was responsible for it. This talk explores provenance as a problem of computation, identity and trust. What does it mean for a person, device or institution to make a verifiable claim about a digital artefact? How should those claims survive copying, transformation and increasingly autonomous computational systems? And where does technical proof end, and social, institutional or legal judgement begin? Using recorded sound as a demanding case study, I will examine cryptographic attestation, post-quantum identity, watermarking and emerging provenance standards, alongside the harder questions of governance, interoperability and institutional trust. Genotone provides one practical experiment in this territory, but the larger question is what a new computational social contract should look like: an architecture in which humans and machines can make claims whose origins can be examined, challenged and, where appropriate, trusted.