Comment by quinncom
18 hours ago
I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world:
> Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with Apple Reference Image, powered by the new sensor in the Main camera that can sign every pixel it sees. When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image.5 Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image, like a digital negative, to visually compare the two assets and determine if any edits were made. APIs are available in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27 for third-party apps to enable viewing of these reference images.
Can't I just point my camera at an AI generated image? And it will get the stamp of authenticity?
It would be great if they could use the LiDAR scanner to sign a depth map of the scene in front of the camera. It would show if you photographed a flat image.
The sensor already uses phase detection autofocus. You can create a depth map out of it. iPhone X used its dual cameras and that phase data for depth maps.
The 'ol "analog hole". Never been able to patch that gap.
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They could use the camera aperture to take a second photo and calculate blur.
And what if you take a picture across a IR-filtered window?
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Pretty sure it does that already.
That's a cool idea.
If that became popular, the AIs would learn how to generate a realistic depth map along with any generated image.
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One can 3d-print the AI generated image and photograph that. /s
that's an authentic photo, not the subject/image, the photo is authentic.
It will look like you took a picture of a screen or print out
People have constructed video walls so high resolution they can film TV series in front of them and to an audience it's indistinguishable from a real set. It's extremely cost-effective for things like space fantasy that needs lots of exotic-looking backdrops, apparently.
It may not be in reach for you and I - but within reach of anyone with the budget to run a 'bot farm'
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Stamp only proves you did the photo and probably some metadata like when where etc.
It helps but doesn't solve credibility issue.
The credibility comes from who took the photo. The next logical and easy step is for this metadata to flow to the user agent. I'll know that it was taken by a legit journalist photographer. And id not, I can have my user agent make it fuzzy or replaced with a kitten photo.
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what is it missing then?
I bet there exists data from the 3 cameras to represent some depth to the image.
Yes.
> I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world
Congrats to Apple achieving nation-wide tracking, embedding some kind of yellow dots[1], but this time this time this is based on strong cryptography and non-removable, targeting people who don't use AI under the slogan "we are fighting AI fakes", but people still "love the feature".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
Are the yellow dots not opt in?
If you have a colour laser printer, not only are the tracking dots not opt in, but there is no way to opt out.
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On the opposite side, this read to me like there was so much image processing going on in the background and off device that they felt like they needed to prove that there was a real image backing the creation, and that it was not all AI. It really begs the question of what the extent is of image processing.
The iphone image pipeline is mostly just playing with exposure and color, things that we widely regard as fair game in editing. Where the line was crossed was magic eraser and reframe where the iphone is straight up making objects in the image.
there is definitely some generative pixel stuff in the iOS pipeline as i've noticed garbled deepdream-esque letters when zooming before
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> Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with Apple Reference Image, powered by the new sensor in the Main camera that can sign every pixel it sees.
Will this also work with third-party camera apps like ProCam?
https://www.procamapp.com/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/procam-5/id6787737491?mt=8
The weakness of this is that a person can take a picture of a high resolution screen or print.
We really need Apple to open up true depth APIs to make forgery non trivial.
I don’t know too much about image processing, but my intuition tells me that distinguishing a photo of a 3d scene from a photo of a photo of a 3d scene is a much easier engineering problem than distinguishing it from an AI-generated diffusion. So even just reducing the problem to the former is still a worthy accomplishment.
Agree with the weakness, but the benefit of provenance is still there. You can't tell if the picture that person took is of an AI image, but there's some value in saying "I took this" and being able to prove it.
I hope future social media presents this metadata so if someone claims a photo is from the BBC, it actually gets checked against the keys the BBC sign their photos with.
How does this actually work though?
1) I see a photo online and doubt it's provenance
2) I contact the photographer and ask to see their cloud image (???!)
2a) I borrow someone's mac to download the image (.jpg?) and it can be verified on that?
Yes, this is really a "Pro" feature, while C2PA exists, not many consumer products have it, iPhone will be the game changer for reporters.
Reporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc...
The problem is real, but this solution seems to not really solve it in any practical sense.
You want to do all that, then still can prove the picture is authentic. The editing history show what had been changed compare to the previous version, from the color adjustment to blur areas... it's not about preventing editing, it's about proving the authenticity when needed.
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Reporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc...
So, 90% of photojournalism outside of the major cities, then.
you could do edits like crops in a way that preserves the signature using ZK proofs
I wish next year for videos too.
We really need it for journalism. Otherwise we will not know what is real and what fabricated with ai.
This feature is not enabled in the eu
lol, called it month ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138302#49142011
Canon's original high end digital models had this as a feature, that your images could be digitally signed in-camera based on raw sensor data. Primarily for law enforcement. Obviously a far broarder use case, now.
So does that mean only the main sensor can do this ?
That smells like "show don't tell", but who knows.
That's more of a software feature..
Feels like the only ones who'd benefit from this are AI companies that are afraid of tainting their post 2023 datasets with their own slop.
On the other hand if this becomes mandated by law I can see it become treacherous for endusers.
It also sounds pretty useful for anyone involved in a lawsuit to be able to present photographic evidence again. I’m sure GenAI is already a big headache for forensics, and enforcing AI watermarks will clearly not be bulletproof.
Will it ever work until a TPM like module is directly integrated into camera sensor? Older attempts of Nikon and Canon got broken, same had happened with C2PA implementation for Android - if it gets anywhere close to CPU it is insecure.
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A mobile phone.. an internet communicator.. a music player.. don't you get it? well, steve, actually 18 years later it's a .. camera
*Not available in EU or China.
I wonder what the common thread is.
> I wonder what the common thread is.
Regulation.
For China I would assume like other services, if there's some cloud involved, it should be on Chinese soil and accessible to China.
For EU harder to guess, but again the lock-in with "Private Cloud Computing" feels related.
It could be because a digital signature could be use to track without consent.
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Cynical take: A single photo to now consume up 50mb of cloud storage, adding to the demand for more data centers that supported the creation of this authenticity issue in the first place.
Finally. Android phones have been shipping with C2PA since last year, so it's great that the final holdout has capitulated, though with its own set of nonstandard tools.
https://c2paviewer.com/articles/samsung-galaxy-s25-c2pa
https://security.googleblog.com/2025/09/pixel-android-truste...
https://c2paviewer.com/supported-devices
The Android version is useless though, TBD if Apple can do better.
https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html
Indeed, on top of Google's implementation being a bad joke, it sounds like the C2PA specifications in general are a massive fail so far. https://arxiv.org/html/2604.24890v1
On the other hand, ignoring standards altogether is the wrong way to go because the ecosystem after capture won't be there.
How will this work against rehosted images on all the platforms people actually share photos from? It’s a good feature but many popular services apply metadata stripping and basic image adjustment before resharing. That seems like the place where people would actually want to verify authenticity.
It works for the author of the image who want to prove the authenticity, and the party that publishing the image who want to maintain the trust.