The notion of their being a “analog hole” for devices that attest that their content is real is correct on the face, but is a very flawed criticism. Right now, anybody on earth can open up an LLM and generate an image. Anybody on earth can open up Photoshop and manipulate an image. And there’s no accountability for where that content came from. But not everybody on earth is capable of projecting an image and photographing it in a way that is in distinguishable from taking a photo of reality. Especially when you’ve taken into consideration that these cameras are capturing depths of field information, location information, and other metadata.
I think it’s a mistake to demand perfection. This is about trust in media and creating foundational technologies that allow for that trust to be restored. Imagine if every camera and every piece of editing software had the ability to sign its output with a description of any mutations. That is a chain of metadata where each link in the chain can be assigned to trust score. If, an addition to technology signatures, human signatures are included, that just builds additional trust. At some point, it would be inappropriate for news or social media not to use this information when presenting content.
As others have mentioned, C2PA is a reasonable step in this direction.