The cost of generating a believable photograph has collapsed, and the technical skill required has gone with it. The 2024 to 2026 election cycle, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the AI-generated and misattributed images that flooded coverage of Maduro's capture in Venezuela revealed the same gap: no institution is responsible for adjudicating what is real about the images that shape public understanding. The platforms hosting those images benefit from their virality and cannot credibly arbitrate them. Newsrooms verify what reaches their desks; nothing covers the rest. The institution that fills this gap has to be built, and it has to be independent, auditable, and accountable, because an attestation is only as trustworthy as the process that produced it.
I.
What I'm building
Image Trust Protocol is a verification API for images and the claims attached to them. Integrators (AI agents, browser extensions, content-provenance vendors, downstream AI products) call it whenever their users need to know whether a photograph is authentic, or whether the claim attached to it is accurate. The platform produces verdicts that are durable, attributable, and independently verifiable.
Civic infrastructure underneath, a working business on top of it.
II.
About me, and why I'm doing this
Mark Biesterfeld
I trained as an opera singer, then moved into music education and nonprofit leadership. I co-direct the Colorado Institute of Music with my wife Leah. Most of what I do there is the slow work of building small civic institutions: the kind that run on modest staffs and committed boards, and that endure only because someone keeps showing up for them.
That work taught me something specific. When civic infrastructure exists, a community has a place to anchor what needs anchoring. When it doesn't, those things drift, and trust thins. Image verification is one of those things now. It needs an institution underneath it, and none exists yet.
I'm not an OSINT practitioner or a digital forensics specialist. My role is the organizer and builder. The verification work itself belongs to credentialed practitioners. My job is to give them a place to do it that lasts.