I was thinking of an approach based on cryptographic signatures. If all images that come from a certain AI model are signed with a digital certificate, you can tamper with metadata all you want, you’re not gonna be able to produce the correct signature to add to an image unless you have access to the certificate’s private key. This technology has been around for ages and is used in every web browser and would be pretty simple to implement.

The only weak point with this approach would be that it relies on the private key not being publicly accessible, which makes this a lot harder or maybe even impossible to implement for open source models that anyone can run on their own hardware. But then again, at least for what we’re talking about here, the goal wouldn’t need to be a system covering every model, just one that makes at least a couple models safe to use for this specific purpose.

I guess the more practical question is whether this would be helpful for any other use case. Because if not, I hardly doubt it’s gonna be implemented. Nobody is gonna want the PR nightmare of building a feature with no other purpose than to help pedophiles generate stuff to get off to “safely”, no matter how well intentioned