What is synthetic media?

The category spans a wide range: a voice clone, a face-swapped video, an AI-generated image, or a conventionally edited clip presented out of context. What they share, for evidence purposes, is that the file's origin and authenticity are contested and cannot be settled by looking at the file alone. A synthetic-media incident is also a race between distribution and preservation: manipulated material can be reposted across platforms within minutes, while removal, whether through platform enforcement or a rapid takedown process, can erase the original before anyone preserves it.

The evidence discipline that matters here is restraint. Detector tools can be documented as a signal, recording which tool, which version, what score, and when it was run, but a report should say that indicators consistent with manipulation were flagged, never that content "is fake" or "is real." Provenance signals such as content credentials or file metadata should be recorded when present, and their absence noted too; neither presence nor absence of provenance data proves the underlying question on its own. The legal and factual conclusion belongs to qualified reviewers and counsel, working from a record that states its own uncertainty honestly.

Finium's synthetic-media workflow preserves the media object, its distribution path, and any provenance or detector signals as separate, labeled layers, so a reviewer can see what was captured and what remains genuinely uncertain.