Kate photo furore a glimpse of looming AI quagmire
Will we ever be able to say seeing is believing again?
As it becomes easier to edit and manipulate photos thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI), the question of what is real and what is fake is becoming increasingly difficult to answer
“Pictures, or it didn’t happen.” It is a familiar refrain uttered by those seeking proof to verify a story or event. But the proof is proving increasingly problematic.
The extraordinary, selfinflicted public relations disaster by Kensington Palace last week is a case in point. What was proposed as an innocent and cheerful photograph, capturing the Princess of Wales and her children marking Mother’s Day, quickly turned into a full-blown crisis, as one respected picture agency after another pulled the photo, citing concerns over its manipulation.
Beyond Catherine’s admission that she “occasionally experiments with editing”, it remains unclear how the photograph was edited, and what tools or software were used to assist with the creation of the final image that was subsequently circulated around the world. Kensington Palace has so far declined to release the original, unedited image – a decision that has invited all manner of investigative work, both by specialists and excitable amateur sleuths.
Some experts have pointed to inconclusive, but suggestive signs that AI might have been utilised as part of the process of finalising the apparently
In the future, people using AI tools may actually be able to make edits, without too much effort, that are less detectable
innocuous image. Dev Nag, founder of the AI chatbot system, QueryPal, singled out the left arm of the top worn by Princess Charlotte, noting there seemed to be a strange texture “floating ahead of the top” of the sleeve. That kind of anomaly, he said, was consistent with the use of the generative AI tool in Adobe’s Photoshop, which is natively integrated into the popular software package.
Others, however, have suggested the inconsistencies within the picture were more likely to have been the result of some sloppy editing, and dismissed any indication of generative AI’s visibility. “I think it is unlikely that this is anything more than a relatively minor photo manipulation,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specialises in digital forensics and image analysis, and was among several experts to run checks on the royal photograph. “There is no evidence that this image is entirely AI-generated.”
Amid an ongoing firestorm of conspiracy theories, it is unlikely that even the most considered, professional rebuttals will prove to be the final word on the matter.
Ultimately, it is a story about trust, credibility and authenticity. One element of that has focused on the impact on the monarchy
– an institution where visibility is everything – and its uncertain attempts to reassure the public about Catherine’s health while maintaining her privacy. It has also raised searching questions around how the media sources and verifies images.
But such issues also feed into wider concerns about the authenticity of photographs, and the ease with which they can be manipulated. Even if AI was not used in the photograph taken by the Prince of Wales, its rapid growth and integration means that such fears are becoming more prevalent, raising a fundamental question – can we really trust what we see with our own eyes?
Thanks to modern technology, it is harder than ever before to discern which images are real, which ones are fake, and which occupy an ever-shifting middle ground. Some specialists who research machine learning believe advances in AI mean it is a matter of time before the kind of clumsy edits made to the royal photo can be improved upon with ease by algorithms.
“People are asking the right questions,” said David Bau, an assistant professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in the US, whose work includes researching AI and “deep” networks. “People have caught inconsistencies in that photo. But they’re the kind of inconsistencies that would show up if you use traditional photo editing software to manipulate the image in Photoshop.
“Some of these inconsistencies are the kinds of things that an AI might be able to do better. And in the future, people using AI tools may actually be able to make edits, without too much effort, that are less detectable. So I think that the kind of concern that is being raised is how can we trust photos if they might be manipulated?”