AI: The 'What-is-a-Photo' AI 'Apocalypse'. RTZ #457

...from 'deep-fakes' to 'far-and-wide fakes'

We’ve been building up to this AI moment for photos in these early days of the AI Tech Wave for months now. In hindsight it may turn out that AI deep-fake photos and videos were the least of society’s problems…it may be AI driven ‘far-and-wide fakes’ that fundamentally change how we think about and consume photos at all.

Instagram photo filters may have been the barest of beginnings.

The tech media has been calling the alarm for a while now, with famed YouTube tech reviewer MKBHD asking ‘What is a Photo’ last year, to the Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and team raising the alarm on the ‘What-is-a-Photo Apocalpyse’, with AI power smartphone cameras and photo apps. The concerns on the downsides of these capabilities going mainstream is palpable.

It’s all going into high gear after Google unveiling its latest Pixel 9 ‘AI phones’, with software features to truly alter photos with ease. As the Verge explains in “Google Pixel 9Pro and Pro XL Review: AI all over the place":

“AI tricks aren’t limited to the camera app — even if they’re some of my favorite use cases.  As Google reminded us about a hundred times at its launch presentation, the Pixel 9 series is AI all the way down, from the Gemini Assistant — the default virtual assistant this time — to a daily AI summary in the revamped weather app.”

“AI is the thing in phones this year, and the Pixel 9 series represents our first look at some technologies that will likely trickle out across previous Pixel phones and parts of the Android ecosystem. A couple are exclusive to the Pixel 9 series, and Google is mostly vague about which features will be distributed to older phones. But altogether they’re the foundation of what Google wants us to think of as AI-first phones for the AI era.”

But then the focus shifts to the deeper AI photo capabilities in “Google’s AI ‘Reimagine’ tool helped us add wrecks, disasters, and corpses to our photos”:

“Google is the latest phone company this year to announce AI photo editing tools, following Samsung’s somewhat troubling, mostly delightful sketch-to-image feature and Apple’s much more seemingly tame Image Playground coming this fall. The Pixel 9’s answer is a new tool called “Reimagine,” and after using it for a week with a few of my colleagues, I’m more convinced than ever that none of us are ready for what’s coming.”

“Reimagine is a logical extension of last year’s Magic Editor tools, which let you select and erase parts of a scene or change the sky to look like a sunset. It was nothing shocking. But Reimagine doesn’t just take it a step further — it kicks the whole door down. You can select any nonhuman object or portion of a scene and type in a text prompt to generate something in that space. The results are often very convincing and even uncanny. The lighting, shadows, and perspective usually match the original photo. You can add fun stuff, sure, like wildflowers or rainbows or whatever. But that’s not the problem.”

“A couple of my colleagues helped me test the boundaries of Reimagine with their Pixel 9 and 9 Pro review units, and we got it to generate some very disturbing things. Some of this required some creative prompting to work around the obvious guardrails; if you choose your words carefully, you can get it to create a reasonably convincing body under a blood-stained sheet.”

The whole piece is worth reading for vividly illustrated and described exaples of what can be done with some Ai prompts and regular photos.

This all then builds into a crescendo of existesntial questions around AI and photos with the new AI smartphones.

The crux of the almost existential calls comes today with the Verge’s “No one’s ready for this”:

“Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke.”

“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.”

Of course, photo alterations have been with us since the invention of photography, as they rightfully point out:

“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.”

After all, it’s what made Adobe, Adobe. We’ve had decades of glossy magazines and covers with photos of beautiful people digitally different than in real life. The issue this time of course, is the democratization of these software tools. Available on billions of smartphones to the masses around the world.

And that can have consequences, as the Verge goes on to explain:

“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?”

Again, this piece is also worth reading and consuming in full for the plethora of examples of what is ossible with a few clicks in a photo app. Axios’s piece on the topic is also worth a read.

I point all this out to highlight an issue that will likely get far more discussion in the coming months around ‘What is a Photo’.

Despite all the possible negative implications of these capabilities, I do believe this will all turn out to be a net positive, for a couple of reasons at least. One, humans are supremely adaptable to changes, especially technology driven ones. And two, humans are supremely creative in their ability to find positive use for new technologies, tools and services.

Think that will be the case here too, but ‘Seeing is Believing’ as they say. AI editable photos and all. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)