Thread

Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

539 points · 352 comments · imwally

walrus01 · 1789532258 · focus · HN ↗
so what happens if you display an extremely high res image of a 100% AI generated fake-something on an 8K display in a photo studio room and take a picture of it with the camera? it gets tagged as authentic.
1. tobyhinloopen · 1789536671 · focus · HN ↗
  That’s a lot of money and effort for a fake photo
2. Gigachad · 1789543344 · focus · HN ↗
  The timestamp wouldn’t match the event being depicted and the geotag would show the studio. And the depth sensing would show the image as flat.
3. petu · 1789543587 · focus · HN ↗
  Was photo not authentic? Think of it "as seen by an iPhone", not "this is authentic event" verification.
  But Apple likely would reject such photo because of inappropriate depth map / LiDAR data.
4. HALtheWise · 1789676870 · focus · HN ↗
  An 8k monitor is typically 33 million pixels, and the sensor here is 48MP, so the resulting image is going to show at least strong moire patterns, and possibly individual pixels. Note that Apple does have a secret neural classifier on their servers looking for that kind of pattern. I also suspect that getting enough dynamic range out of a screen is tricky.
  None of this is impossible, but it could make it really expensive to produce an image that passes forensic analysis.

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