The Sunday Submission № 03 — The Month the Watermark Started Talking Back
In three weeks this spring, three photography contests pulled images for AI — Tokina, an aurora-lit owl, and a Hasselblad Masters finalist. In the same three weeks, the detection layer that catches them went mainstream: Canon shipped authenticity at capture, OpenAI and Google shipped watermark verification. The scandal wave and the detection wave are the same story. A close read of what changed, and what every contest's AI clause now means for the photographer about to enter one.