Leica camera has built-in defense against misleading AI, costs $9,125

Of course metadata stripping protects people's privacy, since so many photos are geotagged these days. But still frustrating.

Shall we begin to expect provenance, then? Like, for our own factual informational health?

Raising the bar of fakes is probably the goal with this

There are probably many possible methods to detect a picture being of a display rather than the real world. The easiest clues are depth of field and focal length metadata mismatching (presumably a macro lens or similar would be needed, and also presuming lens metadata is not spoofable and included in the signed metadata). Color accuracy will be subtly off. Cameras can detect more dynamic range depth than most (any) screens can create particularly for outdoor scenes. That’s just what I can come up with right now - scientists will have a field day publishing techniques to detect pictures of screens.

Inserting fake sensor readings is plausible but complicated enough I doubt any but state actors would or could bother.

Even this standard only raises the cost to create fake images to 100K would be fantastic for journalism and democracy. Much better than the cost being $0.

This is probably useful in a legal context more than anything else. Imagine photos presented as evidence in court... photos taken with a known 'approved' device, with trusted credentials and a way to prove the photos came from said device. I'm sure there are large government contracts for such a device.

I think each camera has its own key. So to do any side channel attack you would need to steal the camera, in which case you can just take a picture of a printout in a lab and then it’s all signed by the camera.

The signature just says who took the picture, not that the image is not ai generated.

> feed false data to the sensor

Then why not replace the sensor entirely and send fake sensor data? It would be difficult to fake depth of field changes in response to camera's focus motor moving. If I were a security researcher, I would really try to see if the camera is smart enough to tell if the sensor data is fake.

> take a photo of a sufficiently high-resolution display

A 60 MP display? (10000x6000 resolution? I want one!!!) That would still make pixels visible. I suspect a display at least 4x larger would be needed. And it needs to be curved, or the out-of-focus corners will ruin the illusion.

Yeah this isn't something to get outraged over. The arguably "entry level" leica is over $6k. They're expensive but well made cameras that are hand built in Germany. If you're buying one you probably know what you're getting or you have more money than you know what to do with. If you think they're expensive, there's awesome options from fujifilm, Canon, nikon, and Sony that cost less.

The non-Ms are beautifully made and worth every penny (eg Q2, SL) but the Ms are beautifully made terrible technology - specifically the rangefinder: they’re delicate, need frequent servicing and can only focus down to 0.7m, so the advent of live view finally allows lenses that go closer than 0.7m to be focused. That said, I just bought a Canon 7D from 2009 and it too is beautifully made.

However, I think the digital signing is a good way to provide the photographer with proof that the picture in the paper/competition is the picture that they made with the camera and not their pal Midjourney.

Why they put it in such a sluggish contraption, I don’t know, but probably a good place to start compared to a Z9 and trying to tag pictures at 500 frames a second or whatever.

In this use case, it’s arguably the other way around:

The point is to prove that the image was taken in the real world, to stakeholders that might not necessarily take your word for it otherwise.

Without any visible artifacts? I would imagine that to be quite difficult actually!

I think the idea is simply that you can prove authenticity if you have the metadata. You can’t prove authenticity without metadata, nor can you prove “inauthenticity” without metadata.

It's like a signed message. The image is the clear text. The point is verifying authenticity.

Yeah I've also looked into this, even designed ways to do it with an iPhone (which has a depth camera useful to detect pictures of screens). But despite all the bellyaching over AI and even finding websites that are clearly suffering from fake AI generated profiles, there doesn't seem to be much interest in solutions.

Of course, allowing consumers to push their custom certs to the chip, without "rooting", instead of having central control.