And the answer is “spam filters and AI personal curation agents will drop any image without chain of custody from every feed that claims to be about reality”.

In a world where any image or video can be generated, chain of custody to a real-world ground-truth will be vitally important.

I've been saying this to myself too many times now...

This will become indispensable sooner than anyone imagines or wants it to.

Will film cameras see a revival?

I think anything analog is going to be suspect; you can take a photo of a digital image and it could look like a real analog image.

Absent a chain of custody (perhaps including GPS baked into the signed image data blob), I think analog artifacts will become untrustable. Unless you can physically date them to pre-generative era!

Simple solution: keep the raw image and AI it on the fly (this is a hypothetical future remember)

Bonus feature: new display devices get better trained / new AI features for free

So now not only are there AI-imagined details in your images but those details are also different depending on which device the image is viewed on. Lovely.

Or no AI enhancements, since you have the raw photo sensor data, even better you can pick your own AI algorithms to apply to the image.

E.g. from the raw data we know the sensor, we can train a specific AI to enhance the image from the known physical properties of the CCD

In a functional government, that data is mandated And regulated