Today my mother-in-law texted me to say, “Can’t trust any photo.” Why? Kate Middleton.

The stunning admission that Kate Middleton edited a photo of her and her children has sent shockwaves around the world and undermined the already dwindling trust in the still image.

As an amateur photographer herself, I imagine Kate would be sad about all this.

Is This the Moment All Trust in Photographs Evaporated?

The popularity and endurance of the royal family can’t be understated. Therefore, the concession that they released a doctored photo really is huge and it means that people like my mother-in-law are now fully aware that photos can’t inherently be trusted.

It’s hard to disagree. Putting out edited photos has become par for the course for many celebrities. But as my colleague Jeremy Gray points out, “there’s something quite different about this instance of image manipulation compared to other celeb portraits.”

When Khloe Kardashian posts an edited picture of her kid on Instagram, it is not also given to The Associated Press (AP) who circulate it to the world’s media.

The doctored image forced the AP to put out a rare “kill notice” on the picture. The agency’s tagline is “Advancing the power of facts, globally.” The photo they put out yesterday was advancing lies, globally.

Will the AP and other huge agencies like Getty, Reuters, and AFP, now have to scrutinize future pictures released by the royal family? You would imagine so.

What is going on with Kate Middleton is currently a mystery. Before the misleading image was released yesterday, the Princess hadn’t been seen in public since December.

But whatever drama is happening inside the walls of Kensington Palace, a huge blow has just been dealt to the idea of the photograph because if Kate Middleton has the audacity to put out a manipulated image, anyone does.

We Desperately Need a System

If only there was some sort of provenance system that could provide irrefutable evidence that a photo is genuine and not digitally altered.

Luckily there is one coming in. If William, Prince of Wales (who allegedly took the photo) had used the Leica M11-P to capture the Mother’s Day snap then we would be able to use the Content Credentials system to see what edits have been made. Soon, Nikon, Canon, and Sony will have their own systems in place.

However, both parties — the image taker and the image receiver — must fully opt-in to use this system effectively. Content Credentials is not designed to be a universal fake image detector; it is a program for news organizations such as AP to be able to chart the history of a photo so it can be better trusted.

It means that, for now at least, we live in a world where photos can’t be believed because supposedly venerable institutions such as the British royal family are putting out doctored photos of themselves.

What’s next? The Pope releasing a picture of himself wearing a puffer jacket?

Scientists have photographed a never-before-seen deep-sea worm species that moves just like a “living magic carpet.”

Scientists discovered the new species of the deep-sea worm living near an underwater methane seep some 30 miles (50km) off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

Methane seeps are parts of the seafloor where the powerful greenhouse gas methane escapes from rocks or sediment on the seafloor in the form of bubbles.

In a study published last week in scientific journal PLOS ONE, the researchers reveal how the deep-sea worm species, which has now been formally named “Pectinereis strickrotti,” was first spotted during a dive at a depth of 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) in the HOV Alvin submersible back in 2009.

“When we first saw it, we immediately starting asking what it was. A vertebrate? Some strange fish? We had this blurry image and that was it, but we were very intrigued,” Alvin’s lead pilot Bruce Strickrott tells PopSci.

“That’s how it is down there. You see things for one minute, they’re gone, and then you talk about it.”

‘Almost Like a Living Magic Carpet’

However, the team saw the species again when they returned to the Costa Rican methane seeps in 2018.

On their second encounter, Strickrott described how the deep-sea worms had a sinuous swimming technique that reminded them of a fantastical magic carpet.

“They swim slowly, but when he really wanted to move, he started to undulate almost like a living magic carpet,” Strickrott explains.

Using a five-chambered vacuum canister device that Alvin’s lead pilot Bruce Strickrott called the “slurp gun,” the team carefully collected several specimens and enough photos and video to formally describe the new species.

According to PopSci, the team has discovered that Pectinereis strickrotti is about four inches long. Its elongated body is flanked by a row of feathery, gill-tipped appendages called parapodia — which help it swim in a wavy pattern reminiscent of a magic carpet.

The worms are blind, owing to the total darkness that they experience 3,280 feet under the ocean. The team believes that Pectinereis strickrotti likely has a keen sense of smell and touch to navigate the inky black ocean.

Pectinereis strickrotti also boasts impressively large jaws. However, it still remains a mystery what these deep-sea worms exactly eat.

 
Image credits: All photos by Ekin Tilic.

On Monday, Kate Middleton apologized for editing a family photo that was released to news wires to mark Mother’s Day in the United Kingdom. The move came hours after Associated Press, AFP, and Reuters, pulled the photo, saying it had been altered in violations of their photography standards.

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” read a statement posted to the Prince and Princess of Wales’s social media accounts. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”

But Middleton’s Mother’s Day picture is not the first royal family photo to come under scrutiny.

Last year, the family’s 2023 holiday season portrait generated tabloid buzz because it looks like five-year-old Prince Louis was missing a middle finger. Even Saturday Night Live poked fun at it, with “Weekend Update” anchor Colin Jost joking, “Meghan Markle said she has a finger they can use if they need it.”

Royal family photos have occasionally been criticized for looking too staged. In 2015, BuzzFeed zeroed in on baby Princess Charlotte’s smile, which appeared forced, and speculated whether the photo had been edited. And in April 2023, tech CEO Christopher Bouzy—who appears in the Netflix docuseries about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle—argued a photo that Kate Middleton took of the Queen Elizabeth and eight of her grandchildren at Balmoral shortly before the monarch passed away had to have been photoshopped—but didn’t criticize it. As he put it, per the Daily Mail, “It isn’t easy to get the perfect photo with 10 children. It appears they took multiple shots and then edited the photo to make it perfect. I would’ve done the same.’

There was a hairy situation in 2014 involving a balding Prince William. Tabloids questioned whether a photo on the cover of Vanity Fair taken with Kate Middleton and baby Prince George at Sydney’s Taronga zoo had been enhanced to make it look like he had more hair than he actually did. The publication had to respond, denying that it used any special effects to give William more hair, but clarified, “We gave the image a poster-like palette. We added some shadow to Prince William to make the white type more legible, and to place more emphasis on Prince George.”

There has been a heightened curiosity about Middleton’s welfare since Kensington Palace announced in January that she had abdominal surgery and was taking a break from public appearances until after Easter. The controversial Mother’s Day 2024 photo is the first picture the royal family has released of Middleton since her procedure. And questions about her whereabouts will only continue until she resumes public duties.

An edited photograph of Catherine, Princess of Wales, and her family that several news agencies have since pulled for evidence of manipulation raises a thorny question: In an age when digital editing tools are more widespread and easier than ever to use, what even is a photo anymore?

From camera stabilization to advanced, AI-driven image filters and other tools, it has never been simpler to create stunning, high-quality images using basic consumer hardware. Smartphone makers and app developers increasingly promote this technology as helpful for creators and everyday users.

But it also introduces fresh opportunities for even the well-intentioned to misdirect viewers.

The image released Sunday by Kensington Palace shows the Princess of Wales surrounded by her children and appears intended to put to rest speculation about her health. But outlets including Agence France-Presse, Reuters and the Associated Press pointed to a misaligned sleeve and hand as evidence the photo had been doctored. (CNN is continuing to use the photo, appropriately captioned to reflect the debate around its authenticity.)

In a statement, Kate acknowledged that she used an editing tool or tools to alter the image.

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she said, apologizing for any confusion the photo may have caused.

The princess did not say what changes she made to the photo or what tools were used.

Although celebrities have altered photos with editing tools for years, images taken of the royal family have a historical importance and are expected to be authentic.

The use of image editing to present a false narrative goes back almost to the dawn of photography itself. Many older fake images, however, required the use of niche techniques or specialized knowledge of photography that wasn’t available to the public.

More recently, programs such as Adobe Photoshop allow editors to make changes to photos; some may be minor, editorially acceptable adjustments. But these tools can also be used to manipulate certain parts of an image, such as making things disappear or extending the background of a photo with just a few clicks. But the high cost and complexity of the software still presented some barriers to entry.

Today, much of the technical work of editing an image is done completely automatically. When users select “portrait mode” from a list of camera options, running in the background are sophisticated sensors that calculate how far away objects are, enabling features like Apple’s Focus Point, which lets users change which parts of an image are stylistically blurred — even after the photo has been taken.

Meanwhile, Google’s “Best Take” software in the Google Pixel 8 and 8 Pro smartphones uses AI for photos taken close together and creates a blended image aimed to capture everyone’s best expressions (i.e. no blinking).

There are three types of photo manipulation, according to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at MIT Media Lab who’s worked on special photography and images projects for Apple and Facebook over the years: appearance, where the tones or lighting may change; geometric, which involves moving around subjects or objects; and generative AI, a more recent concept that allows users to write text prompts that generate completely new images.

He said Kate’s picture appeared to have both appearance and geometric changes, and was likely not AI-generated.

“The manipulation in this image is very unique,” he said, noting changes that impacted the placement of her children’s clothing. “It’s unlikely that it was ever one single image. A photo editing app probably introduced these errors.”

He said he believes the “subtle” edits were done very finely, potentially with a third-party app or editing software such as Photoshop, versus using built-in smartphone tools.

He noted that similar errors can occur if a user starts splicing and merging different images together. “It all comes from real pieces of photos, but it’s more like a collage.”

But even Photoshop is becoming less complex to use with the introduction of generative-AI tools being added directly to the software.

Although Kate’s errors are apparent, Raskar said it will soon become harder to identify the authenticity of images. Image tools with generative AI will allow so much more than photo manipulation because people will be able to create images from completely new scenarios.

For example, an AI tool user in theory would be able to request and receive a picture of the royal, wearing a blue sweater and sitting on chair with her arms around her children, in seconds – without it ever occurring in real life.

Reece Hayden, a senior analyst at tech research firm ABI Research, said he believes the public will become increasingly skeptical and aware that images can be “faked” or “altered” in the months ahead.

As AI images hit the mainstream, it will open up more discussions around transparency and the need to regulate usage so news outlets and the public can better spot AI-generated and augmented images, he said.

Although AI image watermarks already being implemented on certain platforms, mandating that will be a challenge, Hayden said.

“Our expectation, for the medium term at least, is that ‘watermarks’ will not be forced but governments will rely on both business and users to add them in to bring transparency,” he said.

Welcome to Ways of Seeing, an interview series that highlights outstanding talent in photography and film—the people behind the camera whose work you should be watching. In this week’s edition, senior content editor Michael Beckert chats with the Danish photographer Michella Bredahl about her new book, Love Me Again.

In your own words, what is this project about?

I think the work is about so many things, including my childhood. I grew up in the ’90s, and that was when my mom gave me a camera. It became a tool for me. I learned to express myself through images. When I met Sarah and Lewis from Loose Joints Publishing about a year ago, the house started looking through my archive. I’ve been photographing for so many years and I’ve never published anything before, but I would use Instagram to share my work as I went along. We started looking through the work and the conversations we had about the photographs all revolved around me looking at my friends, women, girls, examining femininity through my generation.

I think the work is about stepping into domestic spaces where I didn’t feel safe when I was younger. Now, I am approaching all these spaces again with friends, and also with people I don’t know, revisiting them to shoot. And then we create new images.

The pictures [in the book] were taken over a decade. So it’s also about change, and how my approach has changed. I feel you can tell when you look at the work that there’s this sense of, I don’t know what I’m doing. But over the years you see I’ve developed a language and that I had an intention when I started.

I like that idea of revisiting old spaces that you maybe didn’t have a great experience in, and reclaiming them by making art in them.

When I create, it has the power to slowly minimize the image that I had that wasn’t beautiful. I’m replacing that old image with new memories. The photography that I really love, is there kind where I can feel time. A photo is a moment you can never go back to, and I think that’s why photography hits us years later, when we look back at photo albums.

When I look at your work, the word “truth” comes to mind. There’s just a level of quality to your imaging, but also to the scenes you’ve chosen to create.

Thank you. I am so inspired by so many photographers. I love Lise Sarfati. I love Philip-Lorca Dicorcia. I look at their work and then I’m like, Wow—I’m so far away from that. But I think that was a generation of photographers that had to invest a lot of time, because they were shooting analogs. This new generation, we’re not investing as much time.

I also think the economy now just doesn’t allow younger artists to spend as much time creating their work.

It’s true. As an artist, it’s so expensive to live, so you have to compromise a lot more. Sometimes you have older artists criticizing the new generation—like I kind of just did—but it’s so unfair, because it’s just so hard.

Can you tell me more about how you got into photography? I read that it was through modeling.

I was 14, and I got a job in a video store. A lady came into the store and I could tell she was looking at me. When I finished my shift and left the store, she stopped me and asked me if I’d ever considered modeling. I got signed with an agency.

But something happened really quick: I felt beautiful when I started modeling, then I lost that. To this day, I blame a lot of the adults around me who used damaging, abusive language that made me not like that world. But I met some people who didn’t make me feel like that, so they also made me want to stay.

One of those people was my friend who was an art photographer; he worked in fashion too. He would invite me to his place and he had all these photography books. One day, he showed me this book by Diane Arbus. I’d never seen it before, and I didn’t know her at the time. But I was blown away by the cover, an image of twins. I was 20 years old at the time, and I didn’t know so much about art. My friend told me, “You should go photograph people on the street.” And then for my birthday, he got me a Pentax analog camera as a surprise.

What’s the oldest photograph in this book?

The oldest is from 11 years ago, so 2012. It’s a photo of the couple—the woman is pregnant and they’re kissing.

What’s the story behind this image?

This was a friend I met in art school while I was there, around 21 years old. I took painting classes, and we had a booth next to each other. We became best friends. After art school, I went to a photography school. I bought a medium format camera, and I think this might be one of the first times I shot with it. This is a really special picture for me because when the book came out, my friend told me she was pregnant again.

Do you ever walk away from a shoot feeling like you didn’t get a good picture? How do you react when that happens?

I try not to think like that when I photograph, I think the act of photographing is what’s important. If a picture is good or bad- it’s not really what matters at first hand. They change over time anyway. It’s the act of photographing that matters.

Which photograph from the book did you take most recently?

The one with the woman and the baby, from my friend’s 30th birthday. She rented an apartment in Paris, and that’s why you see the balloons, Her apartment was beautiful, so the first thing I said was, “Oh, Klara, we should photograph you. This is crazy. Let’s do a shoot.” We were laughing about it because I had photographed her for seven years [prior to that]. But this time, I came with two assistants. I had lights, I had food for everyone. She was joking, like, “You really stepped it up. Last time, I was cooking for you and you were sleeping on my couch and I never saw the pictures.”

How did you choose the cover of the book?

I chose that piece because it feels the most like me, like a self-portrait. I look at that photograph and feel really close to something honest, pure, and real. The pictures in the book of reclining women are the ones that also feel the most like me, and are the closest to the reason why I photograph. I grew up with my mom, and when I was young, she wasn’t well. So I would always see her lying down in her bed. And then I would go to these [museum] exhibitions and I would see the reclining woman painted by men. They were both gorgeous, beautiful. It’s all a product of what I grew up with—all these old paintings, and that image I had of my mom.

What are you most proud of so far on your journey as an artist?

I remember living outside of Copenhagen with my mom and my sister, where I didn’t have access to art. My mom didn’t even have a newspaper. So I’m proud that I somehow found my own way into the world. I was also really proud when I got into The National Film School of Denmark. I still can’t believe it—they only take six new students every second year. That was really the first time I felt like, I belong here. That changed things for me because I felt good, so I could actually start working. I could breathe. And it’s the same with the book: I feel like I created a space for people that I feel good with.

Sight was the first of our senses to be technologically shared in a world we did not witness with our own eyes. Photography—writing with light—has historically meant a one-to-one relationship between what was before a camera (defined as a lens focussing light on a recording media) and what came out the other end, created by a human.

For nearly 200 years, democracy and photography evolved together, to their mutual benefit. We could agree on what we were seeing in an authentic photograph, and often what it meant. The photographic still serves as a hallmark of visual reliability. Photographs have often been the catalyst for social understanding—and social change—because we could trust what photographs represented.

Photography can still represent “truth.” But a photographer is the key to establishing visual trust. There is a well-developed but heretofore implicit ethic (“tell the truth”) to establish this trust relationship. First and foremost is, “I was there,” i.e., the photographer is a witness.

But photography as we trusted it in 2022 no longer exists. At the end of that year, OpenAI released DALL-E, the first publicly available artificial intelligence tool that generates images based simply on typing a text prompt. Other companies followed suit, and soon the number of AI “phictions” that were made to look like photos exploded. It has been estimated that by mid-2023 AI had already generated more images than all photographers had taken until the invention of the first portable digital camera in 1975. AI-generated images are now so realistic that most people today can’t tell the difference between them and an authentic photograph.

Because digital photographs (and video, Latin for “I see”) are the primary way we learn about our world in open societies, a lot is at stake. Of course, bad faith actors will use generative AI to repeatedly lie to us with their propaganda when running for public office but there’s more. Imagine another scenario: a family member documenting a wedding manipulates photographs taken on a smartphone—erasing a transgender child—to deny what others who could not attend understand about their family. With no camera-recorded provenance, there is no record of how that happened. Another liar’s dividend is paid-in-full many years later: who will know what to believe in their digital family album?

What are photographers—from amateurs to professionals—to do? Copyright is no protection when an AI company scrapes your images into the database from which it derives its images. Congress is unable to legislate or regulate generative AI, especially when AI companies spend untold amounts to make sure they can continue monetizing our attention. The same is true for social media companies, whose profits rely on “free” (and increasingly fake) content. There are other options, such as poisoning photographs before publishing them online, but these “solutions” all put the onus on every photographer to protect their practice from an existential threat. And though public skepticism about photography may now be necessary, it’s not sufficient to protect the trust relationship that photography has developed with its audiences. Seeing is no longer believing.

Fortunately, solutions exist that could help protect the trust relationship that photography (and more recently videography) has developed with democracy. According to Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information specializing in the analysis of digital images and the detection of digitally manipulated images such as “deepfakes,” there could be an alignment of interests between authentic photographers and AI companies: when lens-based photographs are digitally and indelibly documented as authentic at the point that the image is captured (with no AI applied anywhere in the process) and permission is granted to scrape them, the resulting generative AI models produce better results. As it stands now, the models scrape a rapidly increasing number of previously AI-generated images, leading to overall (and irreparable) degradation of their models.

Today, there are more than 57,000 photographs taken every second, and 92% of them are taken on smartphones. Photographers should demand that their cameras—from capture to editing to publishing—cryptographically protect the original digital provenance, as Leica has already done. Apple, which commands more than 60% of the smartphone market in the U.S., could distinguish itself by building the same open-source authentication technology into its camera hardware. (On the other hand, Samsung, heavily invested in built-in generative AI for its smartphones, believes “There is no such thing as a real picture.”)

Photographs unaltered by generative AI should be credentialed as such. The Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) is coalescing companies to address some of these issues, but their content credentials do not visibly differentiate authentic photographs from AI-generated or -altered images. The CAI, convened by Adobe, itself a purveyor of the leading suite of generative AI and photo editing tools, needs to help the public easily identify images that aren’t generated or edited by artificial intelligence.

Absent any progress on alignment facilitated by CAI, content credentials will soon serve mainly to provide free advertising for AI companies when applied to images. And the effects of disinformation will proliferate: it’s just too much to expect that the public will drill down into the credentials of any image to determine if it is fake or not. Anyone should be able to trust—at a glance—that a credentialed photograph was not generated or edited by artificial intelligence.

We’re at an inflection point in the power of photography. But we don’t need to resign to the future generative AI envisions for us. These solutions will reinforce the trust relationship that has existed since the invention of the photograph, that a human witness—using a camera—was the maker of the photograph. We should be able to trust and verify what we see recorded by a camera.

Unless we act soon, images generated by AI will irreversibly outnumber published authentic photos, and we won’t know when society can no longer distinguish between authentic and generated images.

There are some things that AI should not do. One of them is to take photographs for us.

About the author: Marshall Mayer was awarded an MFA in Photography from UCSD, adopted digital photography in 1994, and takes notes with an iPhone at take-note.com. He is also the producer of the Writing with Light Bibliography and founder of trust.photography, a Discord community.

Image credits: Header photo licensed from Depositphotos