Stock photos are already like that. To me they're worse than having no pictures at all. Generated images are better than nothing because you can make them very specific.

I think there has to be some kind of cryptographic signature solution, like "The BBC verifies that this image is authentic".

We already have most of the required cryptographic primitives for this. PKI, trusted timestamping, secure hardware with remote attestation are some of the necessary building blocks. All that's really missing are camera sensors with built-in cryptography.

And societal care. Our society seems to really like to whine about "the danger of deepfake images", but our actions reveal that we don't really give a crap, as we could solve this problem today if we really wanted to.

I think it would also need to have some kind of embedded version control from camera through Photoshop so you know what was changed.

If you trust how the bbc tells the story, you also trust them when they say the image is true. Not a technical problem IMO.

Sure but then the image gets copied shared reposted etc.

But why? If it is on bbc s website bbc is already saying it is good. Same for any other media. The technical approach is interesting but not needed IMO in this case.

Like I said, because you might come across the image on Reddit or Twitter but have no idea if it's real or not.

It seems to be a pretty common thing now on news network websites, that at the top of the story, or perhaps somewhere in the middle, there is a video. But, you click on the video, and it's something entirely unrelated to the article. I feel like this as been going on for quite a while, nothing to do with synthetic media, but just an observation of an annoying pattern I've noticed.

Why just the video and images? Half of the stories on the Internet are created out of whole cloth by AI now, never mind the embedded media...