How will my grandson know if this photo was not generated by AI? He won’t. That’s the problem.

Apple's 1.5 billion iPhone customers worldwide take excellent photographs: the average iPhone user takes nearly 50 every day! But with generative AI, who can tell anymore whether any photograph is real? You can't. This is an out-of-control problem when other smartphone companies add gimmicky generative AI functions directly to their cameras to monetize our attention.

The metastasizing of generative AI since late 2022 has opened the door for corrupt bad-faith actors to deceive us. Many observers are right to focus on deepfakes in elections. But consider another scenario: a family member documenting a wedding manipulates photographs taken on a smartphone—erasing your LGBTQ+ cousin or ex-felon sibling as the snapshot is taken—to deny what others in the future understand about their own family. What photos will ancestry.com archive to preserve for your family's posterity?

Tim Cook’s opening remarks at Apple’s 2024 World Wide Developers Conference on June 10 announced its much-anticipated plans for AI. The only generative AI announcement Apple made related to photography is a rudimentary “clean up” feature to remove unwanted objects using the Photos app. While encouraging, this is a toe dipped in dangerous waters. Generative AI is a feature war that Apple should not fight.

Instead, we encourage Apple to protect authentic photography, the digital media that has been damaged the most by the mass introduction of generative AI, in three interrelated ways:

• join the Content Authenticity Initiative (Apple doesn't have to invent any technology, the software is free and open-source);
• implement Apple's own “content credential” to authenticate only photographs that contain no generative AI (and include code in the image file to prevent AI companies from "scraping" our photos); and
• establish a new kind of photo-sharing service — Photos+ — to promote exclusively authentic photography as a counterbalance to the AI-infection of social media.

Together, these steps replicate how Apple has engendered brand trust by protecting its customers’ security and privacy, extending that ethic to protect the authenticity of digital media captured on an iPhone.

We don't care if individual photographers augment their photographs with AI after the fact: just don't deceive us, pretending it's real. When a photograph is authentic, declare it!

Everyone should be able to tell at a glance if a photograph is authentic or not, now that generative AI is being forced upon us.

This petition will demonstrate to Tim Cook, as Apple approaches its 50th anniversary, the market demand for Apple to do the right thing: protect authentic photography from generative AI (Tim Cook did not reply to this letter, so I sent him another one).

Make sure your friends and family know that your photos are real. Please sign and share this petition.

Marshall Mayer, Organizer

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