In the era of AI, photos aren’t what they used to be
Remember the old mantra from the early days of social media, “pics or it didn’t happen”?
The saying pretty well summed up our approach to separating truth from fiction online. If you’re claiming to have seen, say, the pope on your way to work that morning or that you recently dined in a Michelin-starred restaurant, well you better have the pics to prove it.
For more than a century, photographic evidence was about as close to a physical representation of the real world as we’ve had. But, thanks to new AI-powered photo editing tools — like the one now available on Google’s newest Pixel phones — anyone can create convincing photos of things that didn’t happen.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Sarah Jeong, a features editor at The Verge, who recently wrote about these cutting edge tools. Jeong says no one’s ready for the impact of this technology. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Sarah Jeong: At this point, we’ve all seen AI-generated photos. We’ve seen the blurry, weird photos where people have strange ears, extra fingers, hair that disappears into sweaters. And we can look at that and say “that’s an AI-generated photo,” but the stuff we saw coming out of the Pixel phones looks really good. There wasn’t a telltale blur, and it was pretty uncanny. Some of the photos didn’t completely pass the B.S. test, but a lot of them did and they were quite alarming.
Meghan McCarty Carino: What are some of the troubling examples that your team came up with?
Jeong: We put a helicopter crash in a stream, added potholes to a street, we added a car crash to an intersection, a bomb in a subway. We added a lot of random animals to different places, and the sort of uncanny thing about those photos was, like, I know there’s not an alligator in a deli, but the alligator looks great. Maybe the shadow felt a little bit off, but it looked great. The fact that you can pop out your phone and you don’t need to open up Photoshop, you don’t need to know anything, you can just type out the words and you get that result. That’s different. That’s a game changer. That’s just a different world we live in.
McCarty Carino: Apple has added some sort of similar functionality with the rollout of Apple Intelligence in the new iOS. How comparable is it to what this Reimagine tool can do?
Jeong: I would say that it’s not terribly comparable. There are AI features in all of the high-end phones. This was the year of the AI phones, and what we found really unusual about the Google Pixel was that they sort of went all out. They didn’t have the safeguards that other phones had. They had functionalities that other phones didn’t have and that we thought were very impressive technologically, but they seemed kind of not entirely great for society.
McCarty Carino: We have been having this conversation about AI-generated imagery for several years now. What’s different about this?
Jeong: This is just easier. It’s built into your phone. You go to the store, you buy your phone because you need a new phone, and now you have access to this thing where every six seconds, you can spit out a lie. That changes the calculus of how many photos are just out there, and it changes how society treats pictures. And the real danger we see here is, you know, if you have a leak in your roof and you take a picture of it and you send it to your landlord, and you go, “Hey, you need to fix this,” and your landlord goes, “fake news.” And what happens there is that, as a society, it becomes reasonable that the default assumption now is that a photo is fake.
McCarty Carino: You wrote about how changes in consumer access to tools like this have changed society in the past. For instance, when smartphone photography took off, it kind of ushered in this new era of everyone having cameras in their pockets. Remind people what that has meant for society and what’s threatened there.
Jeong: People have said this was the era of citizen journalism and that this was a period in which anything could get documented. We’ve seen huge societal upheaval because people took even blurry camera video of police killing people and then later saying that it went down in a certain way that didn’t line up with the video. We’ve seen big protest movements come out of that. And now we’re looking at this period where, you know, you see a video like that, and instead of going, “Oh my god, that’s terrible,” you go, “Is this AI-generated? I bet it’s AI-generated. I don’t want to think about this, so I’m going to assume that it’s AI-generated.” And so like the fact that the default assumption changes, even if it’s possible to prove that something is real, changing that default has a big impact on society.
McCarty Carino: What has Google said about what you wrote? And are there any safeguards in place?
Jeong: Well, they’ve sort of reiterated that they are committed to putting in safeguards and being responsible with their technology, but they haven’t really addressed the stuff that we’ve said head on. We just haven’t gotten a really head on response about this sort of thing.
McCarty Carino: The headline of your piece is, ‘No one’s ready for this.’ How can we get ready for this?
Jeong: I think we have to start having everyday conversations about the fact that photography as an institution, the meaning of it, is changing. It is going to change. These devices are out on the market, anyone can buy them, they’re just regular consumer devices. It’s pre-loaded onto your phone. And as we go forward, we just need to talk to each other very frankly about smartphone photographs and the fact that a knee-jerk reaction to a photo and being like, “this is fake” is not helpful, and also, at the same time, photographs simply are not what they used to be.
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