Photoshop / AI-gen an image -> display on a high-resolution monitor -> photograph the monitor with iPhone 18 Pro -> valid Apple Reference image.
To get valid reference photos, you can go to the actual physical location, put the iPhone/monitor in a cardboard box to block external light, then photograph the monitor. Paint the inside of the box using Vantablack (stopping reflections) and cover the LiDAR projector with tape.
I can't wait to see Apple Verified™ photos of UFOs flying over the Golden Gate Bridge.
Also the dots can be trivially blocked by putting your finger over the sensor, sometimes improving photo quality. I do this frequently when I want to take a photo through a window. The absence of the dot matrix tells the iPhone to focus on the background far away instead of the windowpane.
> Today, powerful, widely available AI tools allow users to easily generate or alter photorealistic images to a degree that was difficult to imagine just a few years ago.
Photoshop has existed for decades and so has fake images. This is a low friction way to attest "this image came from an iPhone sensor and Apple approved it". It will still take the usual image forensics to determine if the scene it depicts is legitimate.
It is the problem that they say they're trying to solve, though. They specifically say "where the essential role of a photograph is to prove that something actually happened".
It fails the reasonable person test to say that in the phrase "something actually happened" the "something" refers to the act of taking the photo.
Likewise, in "photographs that depict real events", no reasonable person could say that "real events" includes fabrications or that the "event" in question is the taking of the photo itself.
https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
The Apple Reference Image feature is here launched on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that both have built-in LiDAR sensors that could be used for this process.
But I really mean that if the lidar barely works outdoors anyway then actually you don't need to be 16 feet away at all.
Anyway, one may presume that they've thought about this.
It’s almost certainly possible to fool v1 of this system, for some images, in some contexts. It would be shocking if the first implementation was completely perfect. But maybe it’s better than nothing?
Discerning a camera taken image of an image is typically very very easy. The collors/exposure/etc will all be obviously wrong in ways to a human, even without doing any analysis.
https://www.elcomsoft.com/news/428.html
https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authenticatio...
You don't even have to travel to the location, you can just spoof GPS. And of course that will only be needed until some eastern european kid gets bored one weekend and the signing keys magically appear on pastebin. Then all it will take is running a shell script.
It's funny to see Apple fall into this same trap.
but im sure it will popular with 60 year olds watermarking their pictures of sunsets.
Scrapped in 3..2..1..
[1] https://commonlands.com/products/ir-cut-filters-csp650?srslt...
A better fix is to take photos with all three iPhone cameras simultaneously, ideally as a 2-3s video, and use the parallax/multiple perspectives to extract depth information. The video files (Possibly audio too) could also be included with the verified image as additional verification.
They can also prevent photos if iPhone detects the LiDAR sensor is covered, similar to how Meta does it with their camera glasses.
Similarly, LiDAR alone will help disqualify cases where someone is just taking a picture of e.g. a landscape target of the Golden Gate, but that it shown on a screen 1 meter away.
seems pretty easy to make it sufficiently difficult to trick the system
WalterGR•1h ago