FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

Audiovisual archives are sovereign infrastructures of cultural memory. They are not merely collections of content: they are the evidentiary foundation of public discourse, the raw material of historical knowledge, and a shared resource whose integrity is a condition of trust in media institutions. Generative AI and deepfakes can pose a structural threat to this integrity — not only by enabling the production of false content, but by corroding the epistemic status of archival material itself. A manipulated archive is no longer a reliable source; it is a liability.
This paper argues that broadcasters occupy a distinctive position in the governance of AI-generated deepfakes: neither as technology providers nor as distribution platforms, but as custodians of audiovisual heritage with editorial responsibility, reputational capital, and existing technical capacity. From this position, broadcasters can act as upstream governance actors — intervening at the point of content production rather than relying exclusively on downstream detection, fact-checking, or user-labelling. The central claim is that voluntary adoption of content-marking standards (watermarking, C2PA/IPTC metadata, provenance certification) by broadcasters constitutes a form of shared technological capacity that strengthens the infrastructure sovereignty of audiovisual archives.
The paper develops its argument through three moves. First, it situates broadcasters within a polycentric governance framework (drawing on Ansell et al., 2023 and Floridi et al., 2024, 2026), distinguishing this approach from the normative inflation critique: the effectiveness of broadcaster-led governance derives not from adding further voluntary principles to an already saturated landscape, but from the specificity of institutional incentives and the concreteness of available technical tools. Second, it analyses Article 50 of the EU AI Act and the draft Code of Practice on AI-generated content transparency (currently under finalisation) as a case study of how regulatory frameworks interact with — and depend upon — horizontal governance by media institutions. Third, it addresses the question of transferability: drawing on critical perspectives, the paper asks what conditions must be met for broadcaster-led marking standards to function as genuine shared capacity across diverse institutional and infrastructural contexts.The argument is grounded in a body of emerging literature on AI governance, media self-regulation, and archival provenance standards, and engages directly with initiatives such as the EBU's sovereign AI framework, and the guidelines developed by the Archival Producers Alliance.