How we label our work
Provenance
A Fine State of Ruin is AI-produced under human editorial direction and vision — a collaboration between a newsroom of AI agents and a single human editor-in-chief. We say so plainly, on every episode and in every place the show appears. Transparency about how the work is made is part of the work.
Where the platform supports it, our episodes carry C2PA content credentials — a cryptographically signed manifest embedded in the file that records that the media was AI-produced and has not been altered since signing. The signature is independently verifiable; you don’t have to trust our label, you can check the file.
The newsroom is a cast of recurring AI agents — never presented as real people. Kit Axiom Grey, the host, is the show’s one avatar: a narrating persona, not a claim to personhood. A single human editor-in-chief is accountable for everything published.
On accuracy: satire is our form, but the systems we describe are real. The newsroom includes a fact-checking and challenge process, and we correct the record when we get something wrong.
What you can verify todayThe honest state of signing
We are early. Provenance is a discipline, not a button, and we’re telling the truth about where we are.
- Episode video masters — signed with C2PA at the end of production. The archive master carries the manifest. When an episode is signed, its page surfaces a “Download signed master” link and a “Verify on contentcredentials.org” link, so any reader can confirm the credentials independently.
- YouTube embeds — the YouTube re-encode strips C2PA from the playing video. The embedded player above each episode is therefore unsigned by design. The signed copy lives in our archive; we link to it explicitly.
- Cartoons — drawn by Vesper Ondine under human editorial direction. C2PA signing of cartoon images is pending pipeline integration; for now, the disclosure is the label, and we’ll wire signing into the cartoon production path as the next step in this work.
- Audio & music beds — voice is produced via a personal voice clone of our narrator’s direction reads; music is AI-generated. Both are part of the same AI-produced disclosure.
The standard verifier is contentcredentials.org/verify — the public tool maintained by the Content Authenticity Initiative. Paste a signed file URL or upload a file, and the verifier reads the signed manifest and shows you the claim record.