Today, Explained - We can't trust photos anymore

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

This week Apple announced its first AI iPhone with features that will make it even easier to edit your photos. But manipulating reality worries photojournalists like Fred Ritchin, who says these advancements pose a lot of ethical questions. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Synthetic image created by DreamStudio in response to this text prompt from Fred Ritchin: "A photograph of a soldier in the Vietnam War taking a selfie." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember the time Sean got fooled by Puffer Pope? Today explained, Sean Rahm is for him. This past Saturday, against my better judgment, I was scrolling the feeds, liking the tweets, and then I saw something glorious. Cool Pope, Papa Francis, in an epic white puffer. He's got the cross dangling over the jacket, he looks like he's on his way to save humanity from eternal damnation.

And he's going to be warm as hell while he does it. Wasn't real. It was AI. In a moment of equal cultural significance, Shirley, AI trickery prompted Taylor Swift to endorse Kamala Harris. Taylor talks about being made aware of AI of me falsely endorsing Donald Trump. She said it conjured up her fears about AI. You can already manipulate images on your phone, but this week, Apple dropped the first AI iPhone. Coming up on Today Explained, what happens when you can't believe your eyes?

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Hey Siri. Say Today Explained. Today Explained. My name is Joanna Stern. I am a personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal, and I play with a lot of new tech. So you were at Apple's launch event on Monday of this week. The big news was that Apple is launching the first

iPhone with Apple Intelligence, artificial intelligence, and that was going to change literally everything in the universe. What happened? What's it like? I have bad news first. It's not going to change everything about the universe. But the new phone is like your old iPhone, except maybe in a different color and some new processors inside and some better battery life. What Apple's really trying to say here is this is the first AI phone, the first phone that's going to kick off what they say is a long journey. It's just the first step in this Apple intelligence or AI, as they've cleverly done here, future. Apple intelligence can unlock even more intelligence with private cloud compute.

Private cloud compute maintains the privacy and security of your iPhone while giving you access to generative models much larger. And so the new processors in the phone, these A18 chips, are supposed to really power these AI features to be faster, to be more private, to be more secure. But what's the AI part? Like when we say this new phone has artificial intelligence, that allows us to do what exactly? What they have shown is a suite of AI or generative AI tools that are going to come out over the next number of months to a year. And those include things like being able to take your notes and summarize them.

Then there's Siri, which is supposed to get a big upgrade in terms of what it understands and how it can make conversation in a more natural way. There are things that you can do in the Photos app, like create a memory video just based on what you type in. Like the kids learning to crochet with Aunt Fiona. Apple Intelligence will automatically find relevant photos and videos and smartly arrange them into a storyline. There's a tool called Cleanup.

With Cleanup coming with Apple intelligence, you can easily remove distracting objects and photos, even their reflections and shadows. And it generates the background in place of it. So I'm mapping out here a big suite of tools that Apple has announced, but they're not all coming out right away. These new phones hit in September. They're being promised as sort of the big first AI phones,

but they're not going to actually have those features till October and really through the next year. You mentioned some of these photo features on the new iPhone. Do those exist anywhere else? They definitely exist. Google's been out in front of this melding of AI with photo and camera features for a long time. Google calls something Magic Editor.

Apple's calling it Cleanup Tool. And basically, this is, you have a photo, you've got something in the background you don't like, right? You're able to circle it and AI can remove it. And it does this really quickly, like right on the fly. This is something that you can actually get on iPhones right now if you use Google Photos, but Apple's going to be baking it in right into iOS 18.1. And then at the other end of the scale, you have the ability to generate by just typing in anything you want a photo that comes out of nowhere. And what's really happening, and Apple's not doing this, they don't really have that kind of tool, but Google and others have put out this kind of tool, right? And so actually, like, there's something that Google recently has done called Reimagine, and this is on their Pixel phones.

And this blends that. You can take a photo you've already taken. Let's say you've taken a picture of your child on the beach. And then you can circle that spot and then say, insert a shark biting a human. Incredible. Right? And so you can have this picture, a beautiful photo of your kid smiling. And then in the back, a shark biting a human leg off.

I don't know, whatever you'd like to see. And so that's where we have this scale of, like, where is the real meeting the fake or the AI? And that's really kind of crazy. It's really kind of crazy, and I'm crossing my fingers here because my mind just went to a dark place. There are some restrictions on what you can enter in. There are. Let me be clear about that. Most of these tools have very, very strict restrictions about violence or nudity or public figures. You cannot put a Donald Trump in many of these, though we can talk about what's happening on X,

where there's really no restrictions on their tool called Grok, and that's gone quite viral over the last couple of weeks. Users have exploited the tool to generate disturbing, even misleading visuals, including images of public figures in false or compromising situations. I've seen some instances where The Verge did a very interesting story about this, where there was a picture of a woman on the ground. She could be hanging out just, you know, watching TV. But then they circled in and put in a syringe and a beer bottle, right? Again, things that, you know, why shouldn't you be able to generate a beer bottle? A syringe, maybe not. I don't know. Maybe that should be a little bit. Okay. That changes the context of that photo. And it looks really real. It does look really real, huh?

It really does. And this is, look, we've had a lot of effort from the social media platforms to put in some protections. The meta-owned platforms, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, they all have new tags where you can say this was generated by AI. But ultimately, it's going to be on humans to just look at everything with a really skeptical eye and say, was this real? That is incredible to me because I'm thinking about, okay, let's use your example.

There's a picture of a woman's legs on the beach and somebody inserts a syringe, a couple beer bottles, some cigarette butts, and then sends that, I don't know, to the woman's family. It's like, what you've just said feels like a situation where potentially any time somebody texts you a photo, you have to say to yourself, wait, this might not be real. And I think that's actually what's happening right now in the election cycle. We're seeing tons of stuff on X and other platforms where things can be taken out of context and you don't even need the generative AI tools. Musk posted a fake image of Vice President Kamala Harris in a red communist uniform. He captioned the picture, Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit? That was the caption.

This comes after former President Trump also shared fake images of Harris. But when you add in the generative AI tools, which they have like a look and feel that you can tell they're kind of AI, but that's going to get better. That's going to get to a place where you really can't tell the difference. You know, it's funny that you talk about it in the political context, because without even realizing it until just this moment, I stopped believing what I see. I don't. If somebody, if there's a crazy political photo, I'm like, oh, I don't think that's real. I don't even, like, look into it anymore. Right. I'm just like, no, that's not real.

And I think we've, some of us have been trained in that way, and I think that's good. We have built in initial responses to question, is this real? Yeah, yeah. Things are changing without anybody ever really saying, hey, my brain just changed the way it thinks about a quote unquote news photo or a photo that I might see on a news site or a social media site. I have an old iPhone. I don't think I have this option. How many people are walking around with these phones right now that have the ability to do this? A lot of what I've been talking about you can do using apps in the App Store. And so this is becoming more accessible. And if you've even followed what's happened with some of the deep nude apps, which maybe you haven't, but there are apps in the App Store that allow you to upload

a photo of somebody and basically take their clothes off. So that doesn't require you to have any special kind of phone or computer to do. So it's not that a majority of people have the smartphone with the AI, the easy AI capability. But I'm guessing if I asked you, what is the world going to look like in five years, you would tell me we're much closer to many people, most people. That's exactly right. And even if you look at what Google just did with the Pixel. So this Pixel 9, I got to check it out. I mean, they just packed in the features. All those features I was talking about where you can reimagine and you can circle something and put in the shark or you can put in the syringe. That's on the Google 9 Pixel.

The thing to consider there is that they have maybe 3% of the market share in the U.S. I mean, very small market share. And globally, that's even smaller. But that's not what matters. What matters is that Android, which powers the Pixel, is everywhere. It is the biggest mobile operating system in the world, bigger than Apple, bigger than iOS. And so Google is testing these features on the Pixel 9. But the executive I spoke to, Rick Ostrilow, he told me, this is a test bed. We are testing this out so then we can bring this to everyone in the Android ecosystem.

So that's how you have to think about it, is that these features that are starting right now We are testing this out so then we can bring this to everyone in the Android ecosystem. So that's how you have to think about it, is that these features that are starting right now on just a few phones are going to go everywhere. That was The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern. Coming up, a veteran photo editor argues that individual photographs have turned the tide of wars, started an environmental revolution, and shocked us into taking moral stances. So what happens when we don't believe the pictures are real? Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained,

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defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. This is an artificial intelligence version of Drake and UL is named Toto the X-Player. I want to read something to you, if I could, for just a second. In the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart.

We may have to rely on the image maker and not the image to tell us into which category certain pictures fall. Do you remember writing that? 1984, New York Times Magazine. You wrote that 40 years ago. Fred Richen writes about imaging to this day. He was picture editor of the New York Times Magazine. He was dean of the International Center of Photography. He's a curator. He just finished a book called The Synthetic Eye about how photography is changing in the age of artificial intelligence. What was the fear in 1984? What were you writing about then?

Well, I found out that with these very expensive machines, you can use software to manipulate photographs in ways that were undetectable. I began to think that the credibility of photography as a witness was vulnerable at that point, so I wrote a piece for the New York Times magazine. In 1984, I think they printed 1,600,000 copies, as I remember, with the idea that if people know in advance, they'll do something about it,

so that we will be able to preserve the photograph as a credible witness. I'd been picture editor of the New York Times Sunday magazine and I knew that on a weekly basis we were showing photographs of the Civil War in El Salvador. It is a war of sporadic engagements and constant mobility. No longer a clash between a regular army and a raggedy rebel band. But more and more, the Salvadoran military, superior in air power and fire power but little else, are having a hard time finding the insurgents and driving them back. Of Khomeini taking power in Iran.

Khomeini's name was the rallying cry that brought down the Shah. And now to his followers waiting outside the airport, he's the implacable opponent of Dr. Bastiar's government. You know, you can have a point of view that varies with other people. But for example, in the Vietnam War, if a nine-year-old girl was burning from napalm, everybody agreed that's what's happening. The sights which greeted us were awful.

Almost the first person we saw was a little girl aged about nine running up the road. She hadn't got any clothes on. She presumably torn them off when they caught fire. You might think that the war should continue, not continue, but it was a common reference point. And what troubled me then and troubles me even more now is if that breaks down, then we really have no shared sense of reality at this point in terms of what's happening outside of our immediate neighborhood, our immediate family, you know, what's happening in other countries. We used to be able to believe with photographs, you know, facts, they were reference points and incredibly important. So climate change, you know, 1968, the photograph of the Earth from outer space by an astronaut.

Sixteen months later, we got Earth Day. People worried about the planet. It was a common reference point. And what troubled me then and troubles me now is that we're going to lose it. And we are losing it. You wanted something to be done to preserve photography's credibility. In the intervening 40 years, what have we done to preserve it? We've done very little. You know, I came up with a campaign in 1994, you know, that we would label

every manipulated photograph with what I called a not-a-l lens icon. In other words, a circle inside a square is like a lens. Think of it as a copyright symbol. A diagonal slash through it would mean it's not a lens. This is heavily manipulated. You know, one or two publications picked it up, for the most part. You know, people told me we know what we're doing. And I think there was a kind of arrogance that we know what we're doing. We didn't know what we're doing. And I think there was a kind of arrogance that we know what we're doing. We didn't know what we were doing and we were not transparent. So I think a lot of publications felt that they had to keep it a secret, whether they were staging images, you know, setting them up to make them look a certain way or manipulating them in post-production.

They were not being transparent. And I think, you know, 40 years later, with artificial intelligence now, it's really a shift, a paradigm shift, in which we don't know what really happened. It's so easy to make photorealistic images in seconds. You could be in your living room in Iowa and make images of Gaza, Ukraine, whatever, and people, you've never been there, but people don't know the difference between that and a photograph. We've done very, very little to prepare for this moment, and unfortunately, we're facing the consequences. This photo causing controversy after former President Donald Trump took to social media

saying Vice President Harris used artificial intelligence to fake pictures showing large crowd size at her rallies last week in the Motor City. I think that there's just a breakdown in the sense of a common belief structure. For example, you know, I think that the last iconic photograph that made a difference internationally to the point where countries intervened was 2015. The photograph of Aylan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian boy, a refugee with his family who drowned. The photo we're going to show you has quickly resonated across the world as a heartbreaking symbol of an utter human catastrophe that we can't close our eyes to. In Britain, the outcry over the harrowing pictures of Aylan Kurdi, plus intense domestic and international pressure, have forced the government to change its stance on Syrian refugees. And then countries, organisations gave more money, let in more refugees and so on.

Today I can announce that we will do more, providing resettlement for thousands more Syrian refugees. The long journey was finally over. Chancellor Merkel has made their dream possible. The dream of living safely away from the bloodshed of a civil war. The dream of a fresh start. I think that the diminishing of the photograph as a potential icon is something that gets everybody to say, oh, that's what's happening. Should we do something, not do something, whether it's climate change, war, refugees, elections, whatever it would be, does not exist anymore. We pretend it exists, but it doesn't exist. So that we're really flailing in the dark at this point, not knowing and not knowing what to believe. The New York Times just

ran a quiz. Here's 10 videos of which one are AI and which one are not. I've been in this field over 50 years, and I got 7 out of 10. I can't tell. Exper experts can't tell. And that's the way we're going. And we're doing it under the rubric of consumer entitlement. The first book I wrote on this was called In Our Own Image, The Coming Revolution of Photography in 1990. And it was a sense that the photograph would show us stuff we may not want to see. Maybe we're look too heavy or too skinny, or maybe we're seeing a war, seeing a famine, stuff we don't want to see. But we look too heavy or too skinny, or maybe we're seeing a war, seeing a famine, stuff we don't want to see. But now, in the digital era, we could change with software, whether a photograph or just synthetically create a whole new image with AI, so the world looks in

our own image, the way we want it to be, not the way it is. So we've lost and we're losing a shared reality, a common reality of what's going on. We're really in the dark. War and famine and climate change are particular cases, and I know why you would mention them. You're a photojournalist. This is your background. But I wonder, do you think it makes a difference? For example, if I take a picture and my sister's eyes are closed and I use AI to make it look like they were open when the lens snapped, does that matter? It matters enormously, I think. You know, my family album, my grandmother now looks like Marilyn Monroe and my grandfather looks like Clark Gable. You know, you can manufacture

whatever you want in terms of your family, your friends, and so on. And then you get to the point where your grandchildren have no idea of what actually happened or didn't happen. So I think the photograph has always been dialectic. It's always been showing you stuff that you may not want to have seen. So if your sister or somebody, you know, has her eyes closed in a photograph, well, okay, that happens. It's not always this kind of perfectionist idea of the way, you know, of consumer entitlement, the way we're supposed to be. It's the way we are. So, you know, you change things. It's like what they used to do in the Soviet Union, you know, in government censorship.

We're censoring our family albums. And then there's, you know, very, very little sense of reality in terms of where we come from and so on. And at that point, they just really become vanity media. You know, we get what we want and the world is what we want. And in fact, the world is unfortunately very we get what we want, and the world is what we want. And in fact, the world is unfortunately very far from what we want, if you look at all the issues going on in the world at this point. You would appear to be fighting a losing battle. May I ask why after 40

years you're still fighting it? Because I care about people. I grew up with a sense, you know, I learned how to read, in fact, you know, as a little kid, by cutting out pictures from Life magazine of, you know, based on the letter of the day. If the letter was, you know, B or something, I'd cut out photographs that had baseballs in it or whatever it would be. And in doing that, you saw all these photographs of people, you know, in different countries. You know, they might be in difficult situations. And I marveled at the ability of photography to show us what's going on with other people so we might do something about it. I thought that was humanity, you know,

at one of its finest moments. You see things, you intervene, you help. The people may be far away. You may not know them. They may be from another culture. You can get to know them through photographs. You're not so insulated. You know, it's our humanity to be able to be helpful,

to be able to be empathetic, to be able to do something for others as well as ourselves. And if this shuts down so we don't know what to believe or not believe, you know, then we end up very isolated and unable to intervene, to help, to do anything, to be useful. And I think that is across across the board, pretty awful. My interest is not in photography. My interest is in making the world a better place. Fred Richen, he's author of The Synthetic Eye. Hadi Mouagdi produced today's show and Amina El-Sadi edited. Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers engineered.

Laura Bullard fact-checked. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.