As the Pixel 9 reviews come to light and the phones reach their buyers (they went on sale yesterday), an uncomfortable truth begins to circulate on the internet: it will be difficult to trust an image again because of AI and Google.
According to The Verge, in just 10 seconds they were able to create each of these images with the Reimagine tool from the Magic Editor of Pixel 9. They are sharp. In full color. They are high fidelity. There is no suspicious background blur, no revealing sixth finger. These photographs are extraordinarily convincing, and they are all fake.
The power to manipulate reality in seconds and without knowledge
Anyone who buys a Pixel 9 (the latest model of Google’s flagship phone, available now) will have access to the easiest and most casual user interface for creating top-notch fake images, integrated directly into their mobile device.
It is almost certain that this will become the norm, with similar features already available on competing devices and expected to be extended to others in the near future.
Photography has been used in the service of deception since it exists. But it would be false to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone reading this article in 2024 has grown up in a time when a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth.
A scene staged with cinematic effects, digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake, were potential deceptions to consider, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility.
Specialized knowledge and specialized tools were needed to sabotage intuitive trust in a photograph. Falsification was the exception, not the rule.
All of this is about to change: the default assumption about a photo is that it is fake, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial. As they say in The Verge, we are not prepared for what will happen next.
Author: Chema Carvajal Sarabia
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