Phone cameras have been a boon for democracy, because it’s hard to deny something when visual evidence can be provided to defend against denial and dismissal.

With deep fakes coming down the pipeline, expect people to scream “DEEP FAKES” when visual evidence is prevented, an argument that becomes more legitimate with the passage of time.

Therefore, we’d need a way to create photos and videos with phone cameras that can not be deep faked, perhaps with a form of digital certification and signing, or cryptographic hashing, a fingerprint so to speak, that intrinsically linked to the digital photo.

That might mean a new raw and/or compressed digital format with the feature built-in, but also a standardised chipset to go with it.

I mean, there’s a real point there, but it’s expressed feebly, and by a simpleton - or at least through a language barrier. When you perceive anything, it’s through your biological filters; we do not see what is “really there” but only what is relevant to our reality. The same is true of cameras - they’re designed to capture a similar range to what our nervous system sees. But to say “there is no real picture” is to import philosophical concepts which are not appropriate to the discussion of photography, which presumes a pristine state to be captured and recorded. You stop playing the “photography” game when you drag in concepts that you can’t simply “point” at and “shoot”.

Yeah, I just wrote someone else’s dissertation on this topic. I think it’s safe to say some are less real than others, though.

I mean they’ve been using “AI” filters for years. Absolutely atrocious software.

watermarks and metadata

It’s a start at least. Now make them impossible to remove.