I think we are going to see more of this. I doubt this is about "deep fakes", as in reality the press doesn't care about it as long as it generates clicks and revenue.
It's more to do with surveillance and being able to more easily track someone trying to play investigative journalist, whistleblower etc. and show them their place.
For instance, if someone takes a photo of a big corporation exec giving a brown envelope to a politician and then another journalist show them to interested parties as a courtesy before publication, they could find out who took the picture and get them killed.
This is very dangerous and stupid what Sony is playing with.
The thing is, it's rather easy to remove this. Even advanced
steganographic watermarks fall to current AI and DSP.
Non-consensual/forced source ID is a fools errand.
OTOH, it's very hard to firmly attribute source ID in a way that
cannot be faked (hashed or reconstructed after the fact).
In other words it's easy to disown, hard to own. Repudiation is a one
way function.
Since we're headed for a post-truth, post-trust digital world the
desirable sides of this seem to greatly outweigh the apparent
"dystopian downsides".
It's more to do with surveillance and being able to more easily track someone trying to play investigative journalist, whistleblower etc. and show them their place.
For instance, if someone takes a photo of a big corporation exec giving a brown envelope to a politician and then another journalist show them to interested parties as a courtesy before publication, they could find out who took the picture and get them killed.
This is very dangerous and stupid what Sony is playing with.