Photo authenticity in the age of AI

I’ve been thinking about how photographs are perceived by audiences in the age of AI.

It’s become very easy to dismiss an image as AI-generated, like this one showing asperitas clouds, but confirming that a photo is genuine often requires prior knowledge or context that most viewers don’t have.

Are there any established standards or best practices photographers can use to assure their audience that a digital photograph is authentic?

As a software engineer, I tend to think of solutions such as public key cryptography. However, this is not something most people are familiar with. It could still allow a more technical audience to verify that a photograph, including its EXIF data and possibly a thumbnail render of the raw image from the camera, was signed by the photographer and has not been significantly altered (except color corrected) since capture.