Thanks everyone for the interesting responses. I can’t respond to every comment individually, but they’ve raised some points that I hadn’t considered when I started the thread.
I’m beginning to think that the issue is considerably more complicated than simply ‘edited vs unedited’.
The C2PA approach sounds promising in that the provenance can potentially follow an image through its editing history. So perhaps photographers wouldn’t have to give up things like cropping, exposure adjustments or even AI noise reduction. Instead, those changes could become part of the recorded history of the image. But as pointed out already, that doesn’t establish whether the file itself is actually genuine. For instance, someone could photograph an elephant in a zoo and claim they’d taken it somewhere on the African plains. So C2PA seems capable of strengthening the evidence for a photograph without actually establishing that the observation itself is true.
And it raises another question, also pointed out here: who would actually pay for this technology, and how complete could that provenance chain actually be?
It would presumably require the camera to create the original credential, the editing software to preserve and extend it, and the various other programs and platforms in the workflow to do the same. What happens when one link in that chain doesn’t support C2PA, or when the credentials are stripped somewhere along the way? The Nikon Z6 III example mentioned above seems particularly interesting in this respect.
And finally, I’m wondering about posterity.
Suppose authenticated photographs become commonplace in 2036. Would this new form of evidence retroactively weaken the old kind, or would there be two kinds of evidence in play?
As I understand it, genealogists ran into a different version of the same problem. Once DNA testing became mainstream, parish registers, certificates and service records had been sufficient proof for generations, yet a well documented paper trail alone started being treated as merely provisional once DNA became the expected standard, regardless of whether the original documentary case was ever actually weak. Perhaps the solution would be to run separate frameworks side by side evaluating older material on the kind of evidence it can actually offer, rather than the kind it can’t.
For iNaturalist, given the enormous historical value of the observations that have already been accumulated, I would hope that ‘no provenance information’ could never become synonymous with ‘untrustworthy’.
With the pace of this technology it might be worth pondering that if it was ever adopted, then what exactly such authentication would establish, what it wouldn’t establish, and how we would treat the enormous body of legitimate photography that exists outside the system.