Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke.
By Sarah Jeong, The Verge, August 22, 2024 (excerpts)
An explosion from the side of an old brick building. A crashed bicycle in a city intersection. A cockroach in a box of takeout. It took less than 10 seconds to create each of these images with the Reimagine tool in the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. They are crisp. They are in full color. They are high-fidelity. There is no suspicious background blur, no tell-tale sixth finger. These photographs are extraordinarily convincing, and they are all extremely fucking fake.
Anyone who buys a Pixel 9 — the latest model of Google’s flagship phone, available starting this week — will have access to the easiest, breeziest user interface for top-tier lies, built right into their mobile device. This is all but certain to become the norm, with similar features already available on competing devices and rolling out on others in the near future. When a smartphone “just works,” it’s usually a good thing; here, it’s the entire problem in the first place.
Photography has been used in the service of deception for as long as it has existed. (Consider Victorian spirit photos, the infamous Loch Ness monster photograph, or Stalin’s photographic purges of IRL-purged comrades.) But it would be disingenuous to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility. It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph. Fake was the exception, not the rule.
If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express. There was no reason to express why these photos matter, why they are so pivotal, why we put so much value in them.
Our trust in photography was so deep that when we spent time discussing veracity in images, it was more important to belabor the point that it was possible for photographs to be fake, sometimes. This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after...
No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?
We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.
We are fucked!
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