I genuinely feel that in this AI world we need the inverse. That every analogue or digital photo taken by traditional means of photography will need to be signed by a certificate, so anyone can verify its authenticity.
https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?%2Farchives%2F10...
It feels like the approach assumes a media environment where a professional wants to provably “show their work,” where authenticity adds value to a skeptical audience.
In that spirit, then, I understand CAI’s intention [0] to be to vest that judgment with the creator, and ultimately the viewer: if my purpose is to prove myself, I’d want to show enough links in the chain that the viewer checking my work can say “oh I see how A relates to B, to C,” and so on. If I don’t want to prove myself, well… then I won’t.
I don’t know Adobe’s implementation well enough to know how often they save a CC manifest, and their beta is vague in just referring to “editing history.” [1] I get the impression that they’re still dialing in the right level of detail to capture by default. Maybe even just “came from Firefly” and “Photoshop wuz here.”
But if I want to prove this Nikon Z9 recorded these pixels at this time and place, or “I am the BBC and yes I published this,” or “only the flying monkey was GenAI, the rest was real” I could conceivably put together a toolchain (independently of Adobe) to prove it in more detail.
[0] https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.2/spec...
[1] https://opensource.contentauthenticity.org/docs/manifest/und...
[2] https://opensource.contentauthenticity.org/docs/c2patool/doc...
Note that your cell phone camera is using gen AI techniques to counteract sensor noise.
Was that famous person in the background really there, or a hallucination filling in static?
Who knows at this point? So, the signatures you proposed need to have some nuance around what they’re asserting.
There is no original image to recover, since we can't capture and describe every photon, so it's not a "fake vs real" image signature... that would be a UI choice the image viewer client would make based on the pipeline data in the image.
I had the chance to chat with him, and what I remember most was his concern that GANs would eventually be able to generate images indistinguishable from reality, and that this would create a misinformation problem. He argued for exactly what you’re mentioning: chips that embed cryptographic proof that a photo was captured by a camera and haven't been modified.