People are concerned that the technology will lend additional credence to the last 0.1%. But anyone who thinks about the technology for 2 minutes will see you can just point the camera at the screen. In cases where it really matters (a court of law, internet arguments between nerds) people will know it's not 100% reliable. Locks can be picked, and signatures can be forged, but that doesn't make them useless.
"C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact With Reality" does not survive contact with reality where very, very few users would even think of rooting their phone so they can create signed fake images.
Malicious users don't need to root their own phones. They just need to go to fakemyimage dot com, and someone else's rooted phone in a clickfarm-type setup signs it for them. I am not operating such a service myself because I thought it was unnecessary in making my point, but perhaps I will have to reconsider.
When a motivated malicious user (who doesn't actually need that much resources) will be able to convince people something is authentic because the verification passes when it shouldn't since naive users are primed to believe it by default.
Should we also abolish Pangram, because it's not 100% accurate? Someone might be convinced a text is not AI-generated when it actually is! We should get rid of it rather than fool people into thinking it can be determined accurately. What about antivirus? We should abolish it as well rather than fool people into thinking that their software is ever 100% safe.
The median instance of AI image generation isn't evidence in a court case. It's cyberbullying, or deepfakes, or fake news. It's called "slop" because there's a lot of it being churned out at low effort.
Yes, software LPEs are a risk -- as they are in every nontrivial computer system. New ones will appear, and old ones will be closed in time, as TFA acknowledges.
Re hardware attacks: The (neat!) glitch injection attack the author describes in the linked "lighter" page only raises the implementation cost of doing image certification properly. For example, if the camera module presented only an interface that dumped raw RGB or JPEG-encoded data plus a digital signature that used a private key known only to the manufacturer, then all that would be required to verify a "downstream" image would be to keep a copy of those original bytes inside the final (potentially cropped, filtered, AI-ed, etc.) image, in the worst case roughly doubling its size on disk (though certainly more efficient schemes could be designed). Any interested third party could then compare the original and final images by eye and decide for themselves whether or not the subsequent processing materially changed the image's "meaning".
Finally: Does the existence of lock picks or bolt cutters render padlocks pointless today? Does it corrode society by encouraging people to mistakenly believe that anything they put behind a $5 padlock will be safe forever? No, and no.
Make it a legal requirement to mark AI generated photos and enforce penalties for posting unmarked AI generations. Social media should also mark the country of origin for each post, with the knowledge that posts from your own country are covered by these laws.
This is ridiculous.