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Comment by randomblock1 | Hacker News Reader

Even at the hardware level, if it was a separate chip that the camera data passed through or something, that's not really good enough either, people have broken TPMs before. It'd have to be baked into the camera sensor. Even then, you could attack it from the next level up, with some fancy optics and a display, or something like that.

I don't think completely solving this sort of problem is even possible.

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And I'm not sure it's even useful to solve. The presence/absence of a digital signature will never be the deciding factor in whether people accept/reject an image as authentic.

Yeah this is what I don't get why are people even spending time on this.

A desperate attempt to preempt regulation.

A desperate attempt to establish their version of regulatory capture and not have to pay licensing fees to the other guy

This is a clear explanation, thank you

Is this picture real or AI is a real problem it is worth money to solve.

Why? An image should never be proof of anything, by itself.

What should be sufficient proof for you that AI wont fake trivially?

What I'm getting at is that metadata that claims that a photo is "real" won't necessarily convince people that it is, and the lack of that metadata doesn't mean anything at all. About the only real use I've seen for C2PA is to confirm that an image bearing that metadata is AI-generated - and that marker is easily lost through editing or retransmission.

Yeah we live in the era of alternative facts and this is just more, at best, "fact checking"

I'm not saying it's an easy problem or that this is the right solution. I'm saying it's a valuable problem and so they are trying this solution.

And it's very real problem to workaround (aka, hack the device into faking the signature).

It is (not sure I agree, but I can see how one would think this) but you're not going to solve it like this

And in 2026, I don't think it's too big of a stretch to imagine that there are going to be people in power that can add + remove the metadata to whatever image they want, at will, to tell whatever story they want to create. Sadly.

There were similar fears about the webtrust CA system, but AFAIK there's no known incidents where a government strongarmed a CA into misissuing a MITM certificate, and then it was used in MITM attacks. The closest is some misissued certificates seemingly due to incompetence but weren't used in attacks.

And there are unicorns living at the end of the rainbow.

> Even then, you could attack it from the next level up, with some fancy optics and a display, or something like that.

The analog hole is alive and well:)

And at that level, it’s a matter of definition anyway. What is “AI generated”? A photo of a screen showing an AI picture is still a photo. If that’s “AI” then what about a photo of an AI generated billboard? Or a photo of a bus with an AI graphic on the side?

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