With the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate and edit images, it has become more difficult to tell them apart from authentic photographs. More users are gravitating towards editing their photos using AI instead of using actual image editing tools, as it is a faster and easier way to do so. Image generation tools made by companies including OpenAI and Google have integrated ‘SynthID’ into their platform, which was made by Google to add invisible watermarks to generated or edited images for other platforms to detect AI.
New code found by 9to5Mac and MacRumors within iOS 27 Beta 5 reveals that Apple is working on adding a feature to the iPhone called “Apple Reference Image”. Once the feature is available, it will be turned off by default, as it requires the raw photo and its metadata to be sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers for determining whether the picture has been taken by an iPhone. However, this feature will also follow Apple’s principles of privacy by limiting their access to the actual raw photo. When the feature is available, it can be enabled under Settings>Camera>Reference Image.
A new ‘Transfer with Provenance’ option is also expected to be added, which would allow these authenticated images to be transferred to a Mac or PC via USB along with their individual reference data, as noted by 9to5Mac.
Currently, images generated via Image Playground contain metadata that allows other apps and platforms to detect that the image was created using AI.
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