We need camera hardware to be able to sign photos

Seems like something that would be miss-used against people in horrible ways.

I think it might be enough to be able to verify that a photo was taken by a particular manufacturer's camera, not necessarily a specific camera/owner.

TIL this exists... C2PA can digitally sign the complete lifecycle of an image, starting from capture on the camera:

https://petapixel.com/2026/02/21/a-look-at-an-image-verifica...

(I submitted this article to HN too as I thought it was pretty interesting)

Then I can take a photo of an AI generated image.

I think it would be hard to make that look like an image you'd taken naturally, rather than one of a screen

That might impose enough effort to stop most slop from being spammed everywhere.

Could offer a service that automates it with a DSLR pointing at a screen laundering images one after another.

This would probably still be way better than the status quo, because it would introduce a higher barrier for entry and more friction into the slop delivery system and give the moderation and spam detection a chance to catch up. Much easier to detect and delete 5000 laundered slop images than 500.000.