Comment by airstrike

8 hours ago

Regardless of one's opinion about this particular project, it seems obvious to me that the path forward is proving authenticity of non-AI resources rather than attempting to watermark all the AI-generated ones.

Pretty hard problem to tackle when you can point an "authenticated" camera at a really nice screen and snap a 'definitely real' photo of anything a screen can display :(

  • Isn’t the goal only to prove that a photograph was taken with a particular camera? I don’t think you could ever prove that the subject was legitimate, as there are countless ways to misrepresent things. But in a world of AI slop, knowing a photo was taken on a real camera and wasn’t synthesized artificially is still a useful data point in determining trust.

  • There's probably a technical solution, such as the camera manufacturer cryptographically signing a GPS location and timestamp together with the pixels. Like all DRM it will probably be broken though, and more importantly, would anyone (even e.g. a newspaper editor) care enough to verify the signature?

    • Spoofing GPS timing signals isn't as hard as it used to be. If you know what you're looking for on AliExpress you can get all the equipment you need