Image Fakery in the A.I. Era ⇥ theverge.com

Jess Weatherbed, the Verge:

Image manipulation techniques and other methods of fakery have existed for close to 200 years — almost as long as photography itself. (Cases in point: 19th-century spirit photography and the Cottingley Fairies.) But the skill requirements and time investment needed to make those changes are why we don’t think to inspect every photo we see. Manipulations were rare and unexpected for most of photography’s history. But the simplicity and scale of AI on smartphones will mean any bozo can churn out manipulative images at a frequency and scale we’ve never experienced before. It should be obvious why that’s alarming.

This excellent piece is a necessary correction for too-simple comparisons between Google’s Reimagine feature and Adobe Photoshop. It also encouraged me re-read my own article about the history of photo manipulation to see if it holds up and, thankfully, I think it mostly does, even as Google’s A.I. editing tools have advanced from useful to irresponsible.

Last year’s features mostly allowed users to reposition and remove objects from their shots. This still seems fine, but one aspect of my description has not aged well. I wrote, in the context of removing a trampoline from a photo of a slam dunk, that Google’s tools make it “a little bit easier […] to lie”. For object removal, that remains true; for object addition — which is what Google’s Reimagine feature allows — it is much easier.

Me:

The questions that are being asked of the Pixel 8’s image manipulation capabilities are good and necessary because there are real ethical implications. But I think they need to be more fully contextualized. There is a long trail of exactly the same concerns and, to avoid repeating ourselves yet again, we should be asking these questions with that history in mind. This era feels different. I think we should be asking more precisely why that is.

Between Weatherbed’s piece and Sarah Jeong’s article on similar themes, I think some better context is rapidly taking shape, driven largely by Google’s decision to include additive features with few restrictions. A more responsible implementation of A.I. additions would limit the kinds of objects which could be added — balloons, fireworks, a big red dog. But, no, it is more important to Google — and X — to demonstrate their technological bonafides.

These technologies are different because they allow basically anyone to make basically any image realistically and on command with virtually no skill. Oh, and they can share them instantly. Two hundred years of faked photos cannot prepare us for the wild ride ahead.