[p1necone]

The signature only proves that the website/Bill the photographer was involved in the chain sending the website/photograph to you, not anything about the content itself.

Unless you have reason to trust Bill himself you can't trust that he actually took the photo, or that it isn't ai generated. Although knowing that Bill isn't tech savvy enough to do those things might be enough.

[jacobr1]

That ... might be all we get though. If anybody can produce artificial, but realistic content that is indistinguishable from something the real thing, then all we might have is our willingness to trust any given originator/distributor of the content.

Narrowing down the problem to "Do we trust Bill" is at least something we can attempt to address. This also eliminates some sources where we can more easily discount things. If the source is 4chan, maybe I don't need much more information to make my repetitional assessment.