martyria

Martyria (Greek μαρτυρία: testimony, the statement of a witness). What a maker's own tool did to a picture, written into the picture, in bytes nothing quietly rounded on the way out. A testimony is bounded by what the witness actually knows, and the whole discipline of this word is the boundary: an application knows exactly one thing, which is what IT did, and the sentence everyone reaches for first — "this image is not AI-generated" — is a claim about someone else's file the moment the picture came in from somewhere else. One overclaim costs the entire declaration its worth to the one person who ever checks it, so every sentence is scoped to this application's own edits, the disclaimer saying so has no off switch and no key that could drop it, and the one origin that may honestly be named — IPTC digitalCapture, for a frame this app's own camera made — is set from a single exact value and from nothing else. algorithmicMedia is deliberately never used, because it covers any algorithm at all and would mislead every reader who has learned it means a model; trainedAlgorithmicMedia, the AI term, appears only inside the negation. The claim is columns rather than prose — five key/value pairs a reader showing only one field still learns something true from — and it is carried as PNG iTXt and never tEXt, because tEXt is Latin-1 and would mangle a name with a fada in it. Beneath the sentence lies the reason the bytes can be testified to at all: a two-dimensional canvas backing store holds premultiplied colour, so straight-alpha pixels pushed through it come back quantised — at alpha eight of 255, nine of 256 values a channel survive — and so the file is built by hand, colour type 6, eight bits, all five row filters chosen by cost, with a stored-block fallback so the result is always a valid file. Bytes that are not a picture come back unchanged rather than thrown, because metadata is never worth losing a file over. It answers the flagging problem by giving a checker something honest to read; it is evidence and never a lock, and a chunk anyone can strip is not a claim about tamper.