No One's Ready for This

(This is about the ramifications of the new AI image editing tools in Pixel 9 and others)

I've been thinking for a while that digital photos should include a signature derived from a hardware key on each camera. That at least would prevent people lying in metadata, and give us some means to verify. If I trust Canon's signature, I trust that these pixels were taken by a camera.

> You can already see the shape of what’s to come. In the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, the defense claimed that Apple’s pinch-to-zoom manipulates photos, successfully persuading the judge to put the burden of proof on the prosecution to show that zoomed-in iPhone footage was not AI-manipulated. More recently, Donald Trump falsely claimed that a photo of a well-attended Kamala Harris rally was AI-generated — a claim that was only possible to make because people were able to believe it.

The issue in the Rittenhouse case was about zooming in on and enhancing a tiny region in a video frame claimed to show Rittenhouse aiming his rifle at protesters[0]. The pixels intepreted as Rittenhouse's support hand turned out to already be present in the frames before he approaches[1], so it's hard to argue that the judge's decision (show the unmodified video, or get an expert to testify about Apple's upscaling) wasn't correct. That there were in fact misleading pixels/artifacts, and that they were from traditional non-AI photography/upscaling, makes this example cut against the article in both ways.

For cases like the rally, where we have multiple independent perspectives, I also don't think much changes. The hard part would be the conspiracy between many participants including major news organisations. Photobashing a crowd, or "An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout", in one person's image has never really been difficult.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/7uWonoK.png

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/4itI2r8.png