Apple spent much of its “Surprise and shine” fall event breathlessly detailing the new AI capabilities of Apple Intelligence and the new Photographic Styles with the iPhone 18 Pro. The new features offer greater AI-assisted abilities to change the look of a photo. In the midst of all this, the company also introduced a defense against AI-generated and -altered images.

The iPhone 18 Pro adds a new Reference camera mode, which digitally authenticates that an image you took with the phone hasn’t been altered with AI. It creates an unalterable reference photo captured by the phone’s sensor. The phone sends sensor signatures and other identifiers to Private Cloud Compute to authenticate the reference photo.

Reference photos are saved in the Photos app next to the main image that can be edited so you can see the original and edited versions next to one another to compare the two. 

Apple also announced support for Google’s SynthID standard for authenticating images. Together, these tools give photographers and journalists ways to verify their work. And fishermen now have verifiable evidence that the fish they caught really was that big.

Matt Elliott

Senior Editor

Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he’s not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.

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