When Apple released the iPhone 17 series and iOS 26, it missed a golden opportunity to leverage its market dominance for a good cause -- one that Google adopted in its Pixel 10 line. With so many AI-generated images flooding our feeds, it's more important to distinguish between fake and real images.
Google is doing this with a low-level feature in its Pixel 10 phones called C2PA content credentials. C2PA, or the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, is an effort to identify whether an image has been created or edited using AI and help weed out fake images. AI misinformation is a growing problem, especially as the systems used to create them have been rapidly improving -- with Google among those advancing the technology.
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Apple, however, is not part of the coalition of companies pledging to work with C2PA content credentials. But it sells millions of iPhones, some of the most popular image-making devices in the world. It's time the company implemented the technology in its iPhone 17 cameras.
Identifying genuine photos from AI-edited ones
C2PA is an initiative founded by Adobe to tag media with content credentials that identify whether they're AI-generated or AI-edited. Google is a member of the coalition. Starting with the Pixel 10 line, every image captured by the camera is embedded with C2PA information, and if you use AI tools to edit a photo in the Google Photos app, it will also get flagged as being AI-edited.
When viewing an image in Google Photos on a phone, swipe up to display information about it. In addition to data such as which camera settings were used to capture the image, at the bottom is a new "How this was made" section. It's not incredibly detailed – a typical shot says it's "Media captured with a camera" -- but if an AI tool such as Pro Res Zoom was used, you'll see "Edited with AI tools." (I was able to view this on a Pixel 10 Pro XL and a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, but it didn't show up in the Google Photos app on an iPhone 16 Pro.)
Enlarge Image A photo captured by the Pixel 10 Pro XL includes C2PA information indicating that AI tools were used, in this case Pro Res Zoom, which uses generative AI to rebuild an image zoomed at 100x. Screenshot by Jeff Carlson/CNET
As another example, if you edit a photo after taking it using the Help me edit field to replace the background of an image, the generated version also includes "Edited with AI tools" in the information.
Enlarge Image Using Google's descriptive editing tool in Google Photos adds the "Edited with AI tools" indicator because the background has been replaced with an AI-generated one. Screenshot by Jeff Carlson/CNET
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