Aside from the fact that this was obviously never viable and the entire problem is clearly unsolvable if you sit down and really probe it for fifteen minutes, what I find most frustrating about this is that the false promise of preserving photos as reliable evidence is actively harmful.
You will not build a perfect system, or even something near perfect. The best you're going to do is make it so that it's hard to casually present AI photos as real, leaving only the cases where it really matters. In the "best" case, you've just made the public more trusting of photos in general, so that when there's actual money or power on the line that makes jumping through the hoops to fake authenticity worth it, the public is more susceptible.
The best outcome at this point is for everyone to get on the same page that photos have roughly the same probative value now as drawings. Poorly thought out snake oil efforts to prove authenticity are only going to delay that.
You will not build a perfect system, or even something near perfect. The best you're going to do is make it so that it's hard to casually present AI photos as real, leaving only the cases where it really matters. In the "best" case, you've just made the public more trusting of photos in general, so that when there's actual money or power on the line that makes jumping through the hoops to fake authenticity worth it, the public is more susceptible.
The best outcome at this point is for everyone to get on the same page that photos have roughly the same probative value now as drawings. Poorly thought out snake oil efforts to prove authenticity are only going to delay that.