Earthquakes were chaos until we built the seismograph and agreed on a scale. Suddenly a shared, comparable number existed for something previously experienced only as vibes. Synthetic information needs the same thing: an instrument for how much of a given feed, market, or conversation is machine-made.

Right now we argue about it anecdotally. "The bots took over around 2022." "No, earlier." Without a scale, these are just impressions. An AI seismograph would turn synthetic saturation into a reading you could compare across platforms and over time.

You cannot manage a flood you have no gauge for. First build the gauge.

Content provenance standards are the closest thing to a first sensor: cryptographic signals about where a piece of media came from. They are not the whole instrument, but they are the raw data any future scale would have to read.