A Standard for Legacy Preservation in the Age of AI

The Governance Platform

For most of recorded history, the challenge of personal legacy was a challenge of survival. Would the document endure? Would the recording hold? Could a voice travel across the distance of time? These were the questions that organized archival practice — and they were, at root, engineering questions. Solve the medium and you solve the problem.

Beginning around 2023, a categorically different problem arrived. For the first time, it became genuinely difficult to determine from an artifact alone whether a primary source was produced by a human being or generated by a machine. A voice recording may be testimony or synthesis. A written account may emerge from lived experience or from a statistical prediction of what lived experience sounds like. The artifact no longer carries its own authentication.

This is not a crisis of forgery in the traditional sense. It is a crisis of category. The entire class of materials we call primary sources has been destabilized. The condition that once defined them — the recognition that a human being was present at their creation — can no longer be read from the evidence alone. While prediction models cannot produce primary sources, they can mimic them with considerable plausibility. Future historians and legacy-minded families will thirst for provenance. They will need chains of human custody. They will look for sources of authority that can attest to a record from the moment of its production.

There is a second, older problem underneath the new one. No agreed-upon system has ever existed for capturing a full human life as a primary source. Oral history came closest — but oral history was built for groups, for communities, for the intersection of individual lives with world events. Biography interprets rather than records. Apps prompt rather than witness. What the field has never produced is a rigorous, credentialed, methodologically defensible standard for the documentation of a single human life in its full interior complexity.

Sondage exists to provide both forms of attestation: against the synthetic and against the absent. It is a governance platform and credentialing standards body — not a recording service, not a memoir company, not a technology platform. It defines and certifies the conditions under which legitimate life-history work can occur, credentials the independent practitioners who perform it, and provides the infrastructure through which that work arrives permanently in the Fellow's sovereign control.

That is the Sondage Standard.