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This seems like a great time to mention C2PA, a specification for positively affirming image sources. OpenAI participates in this, and if I load an image I had AI generate in a C2PA Viewer it shows ChatGPT as the source.

Bad actors can strip sources out so it's a normal image (that's why it's positive affirmation), but eventually we should start flagging images with no source attribution as dangerous the way we flag non-https.

Learn more at https://c2pa.org

4 comments

> but eventually we should start flagging images with no source attribution as dangerous the way we flag non-https.

Yes, lets make all images proprietary and locked behind big tech signatures. No more open source image editors or open hardware.

C2PA is actually an open protocol, à la SMTP. the whole spec is at https://spec.c2pa.org/, available for anyone to implement.

The standard itself being open is irrelevant. I'm not sure why this is always brought up for attestation standards. It is fundamentally impossible to trust the signature from open-source software or hardware, so a signature from open-source software is essentially the same as no signature.

The need for a trusted entity is even mentioned in your specification under the "attestation" section: https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/1.4/atte...

So now, if we were to start marking all images that do not have a signature as "dangerous", you would have effectively created an enforcement mechanism in which the whole pipeline, from taking a photo to editing to publishing, can only be done with proprietary software and hardware.

We already have a centrally curated trust model in https. Browsers only treat connections as "secure" if they chain up to a root CA in their trust store. You can operate outside that system, but users will see warnings and friction. Some level of trust concentration isn’t new.

I'm curious if you think this is worse or not as bad as a best-case broad implementation c2pa...especially if there is a similar Let's Encrypt entity assisting with signatures.

Why would the image itself have to be proprietary to have some new piece of metadata attached to it ?

> Bad actors can strip sources out

I think the issue is that it's not just bad actors. It's every social platform that strips out metadata. If I post an image on Instagram, Facebook, or anywhere else, they're going to strip the metadata for my privacy. Sometimes the exif data has geo coordinates. Other times it's less private data like the file name, file create/access/modification times, and the kind of device it was taken on (like iPhone 16 Pro Max).

Usually, they strip out everything and that's likely to include C2PA unless they start whitelisting that to be kept or even using it to flag images on their site as AI.

But for now, it's not just bad actors stripping out metadata. It's most sites that images are posted on.

There’s actually a part of the NY state budget right now (TEDE part X, for my law nerds) that’d require social media companies to preserve non-PII provenance metadata and surface it to the user, if the uploaded image has it.

linkedin already does this--- see https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a6282984, and X’s “made with ai” feature preserves the metadata but doesn’t fully surface it (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/882974/x...)

You're implying social platforms aren't bad actors ;)

In seriousness, social platforms attributing images properly is a whole frontier we haven't even begun to explore, but we need to get there.

Yeah, OpenAI has been attaching C2PA manifests to all their generated images from the very beginning. Also, based on a small evaluation that I ran, modern ML based AI generated image detectors like OmniAID[1] seem to do quite well at detecting GPT-Image-2 generated images. I use both in an on-device AI generated image detector that I built.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08423

What a dystopian, pro-tyranny ask. Horrifying.

The comments that aren't directly discussing the technical achievement here are bemoaning the destruction to society that AI generated images can cause, which is a fair criticism. I'm genuinely curious what you think the greater horror is. Or what a better solution might be.

Reddit blurs nsfw images by default. You can change that in settings. I don't see what it so terrible about the idea of doing this with untrusted image sources.

To ask for verification whether a photo is real or fake?