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When Apple released iPhone 17 series and iOS 26It missed a golden opportunity to leverage its market dominance for a good cause – a cause that Google has embraced in its work. Pixel 10 line. With so many AI-generated images flooding our feeds, it’s important to differentiate between them Fake and real pictures.
Google does this through a low-level feature in the Pixel 10 phones called C2PA content credentials. C2PA or Alliance for Content Source and Authenticityis an effort to determine whether an image has been created or edited using artificial intelligence and help weed out fake images. Misinformation about artificial intelligence It is a growing problem, especially since the systems used to create it were Get better quickly – With Google among those developing the technology.
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However, Apple is not part of the coalition of companies pledging to work with C2PA content credentials. But it sells millions of iPhones, one of the most popular photo-making devices in the world. It is time for the company to apply technology in its field iPhone 17 cameras.
Recognize real photos from those edited by artificial intelligence
C2PA is an initiative founded by Adobe to tag media with content credentials that determine whether it is AI-generated or AI-edited. Google is a member of the coalition. Starting with the Pixel 10 line, every photo the camera takes is included with C2PA information, and if you use AI tools to edit a photo in the Google Photos app, it will also be marked as AI-edited.
When viewing an image in Google Photos on… phoneSwipe up to view information about that topic. In addition to data such as the camera settings that were used to take the photo, at the bottom is a new section titled “How This Was Made.” It’s not incredibly detailed – a typical snapshot says it’s ‘media captured in camera’ – but if an AI tool like Pro Res Zoom is used, you’ll see ‘Edited with AI tools’. (I was able to watch this on the Pixel 10 Pro XL and… Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultrabut it did not appear in the Google Photos app on my device iPhone 16 Pro.)
The image captured by the Pixel 10 Pro XL includes C2PA information indicating that AI tools were used, in this case Pro Res Zoom, which uses generative AI to reconstruct an image zoomed in at 100x.
As another example, if you edit a photo after taking it with Help me edit To replace the image background, the generated version also includes “Edited with AI tools” in the information.
Using Google’s meta editing tool in Google Images adds an “Edited with AI tools” indicator because the background has been replaced with an AI-generated one.
To be fair, AI plays a role in almost every photo you take with a smartphone, since machine learning is used to identify objects and scenes to better combine exposure bursts taken when you tap the shutter button. The Pixel 10 flags those photos as “edited with non-AI tools,” so Google is applying the AI tag specifically to photos where generative AI is working. So far, the implementation is inconsistent: a short AI-generated clip I created using the Photo to Video feature in Google Photos on the Pixel 10 Pro XL shows no C2PA data at all, even though it does include a “Veo” watermark in the corner of the video.
These video frames were generated by AI from a still image (left), but since the result is a video, Google Photos doesn’t display the C2PA tag.
What’s important is that the C2PA information is there
But here’s the key point: What Google is doing isn’t just tagging photos that have been touched by AI. The Camera app adds C2PA data to all The photo you take, even the one you take and do nothing with.
The goal is not to highlight AI-edited photos. It lets you look at any image and see where it came from.
When I spoke to Isaac Reynolds, director of the Pixel camera group, ahead of the Pixel 10 launch, C2PA was a prominent topic even though in practice the feature isn’t as remotely visible as the Pro Res Zoom or the new Camera trainer.
“The reason we’re so committed to saving this metadata in every Pixel camera photo is so people will start to be suspicious of photos without any information,” Reynolds said. “We’re just trying to flood the market with that label so people start expecting the data to be there.”
That’s why I think Apple needs to adopt C2PA and label every photo taken with an iPhone. This would represent a massive influx of tagged images and gives weight to the idea that an untagged image should be considered inauthentic. If the image appears inappropriate, especially when it includes current events or is intended to imitate a company in order to deceive you, Given her information It can help you make an informed decision.
Google is no stranger here. Samsung Galaxy phones add AI watermark And a content approval tag for images that include AI-generated material. Unfortunately, since Apple is not listed as one of the companies C2PA membersI admit, it seems like a stretch to expect the company to embrace this technology. But given Apple’s size and market influence, adding C2PA credentials to every photo an iPhone takes would make a difference and hopefully encourage more companies to join.