Memories of birthdays, holidays, weddings. And also with his hand raised hitting the ball from Diego’s goal against the English in ’86. Or that of the 1930s, of eleven workers who built the Rockefeller Center in New York, sitting on a beam 250 meters high and without protection.
Moments that are preserved in the collective memory or kept in a box, and now on the cell phone or in the cloud. Photos. A materialized moment that works as well as a memory aid. And if it is with a better smile, perhaps to convince ourselves that everything in the past was better.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been threatening to come for everything and the first thing can bury is the idea of photography as a representation of reality as something that happened, something that was, a document.
Several next-generation cell phones, launched at the end of last year and at the beginning of 2024, incorporate AI and sensors that allow elements to be added or removed from a photo with the touch of a button. Or change the background and go from a cloudy afternoon to one with full sun. All without anyone discovering the trick.
For example, the first one to come out with a powerful AI tool was the Google Pixel 8. Then came the Samsung Galaxy S24.
The potential photos from these cell phones add to the filters of social networks, especially on Instagram, where when someone posts an admirable image without retouching, they usually add “without filter”, because The usual is already the unreal.
The newspaper The New York Times addressed the issue with concern in his article “Photographs taken by cell phones are increasingly fake. Time to worry?” In one of his paragraphs he explains: “Imagine a photograph in which a person’s shoulder does not appear completely in the image. With Google software, you can now press the Magic Editor and move that person within the area delimited by the photograph. “The software will then use artificial intelligence to produce the rest of that person’s shoulder.”
Photography: “Procedure or technique that allows obtaining still images of reality through the action of light on a sensitive surface or on a sensor,” defines the Royal Spanish Academy, which may have to review the concept, especially because the new phones make that cameras can incorporate elements into the photo, even at the time of creation or take.
The North American newspaper reflects that “the arrival of the Pixel 8 represents a inflection point. It is the first phone available to everyone that integrates artificial intelligence directly into the photo creation process at no extra cost, propelling cell phone photography into an era where people will have to increasingly questioning whether what you see in your images is real including photographs sent by loved ones.”
After the commotion caused by the arrival of these cell phones, Meta announced that in the coming months will begin tagging images generated with AI on their Facebook, Instagram and Threads networks. “We are building tools that can identify invisible markers so we can tag images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock,” said a company executive.
If Maradona’s arm had been erased in the photo of the goal by the hand of God with AI, would football fans today have one less epic to tell? And if someone had thought to remove “the tank man” from the shot, the one who stood in front of the Tiananmen tanks in 1989, would the ending of that story have been different?
In search of the truth
“When photographic and cinematographic images first appeared and later television images, part of their success lay in a supposed better relationship with some principle of truth. It was soon understood that a photo or film had a point of enunciation and, therefore, It was as forgeable as any other speech. But with the appearance of the digital image and the structuring of the visible based on the principle of information, this fact became much more evident. AI intensifies this simulation principle by hiding it with a very high quality of production and a democratization of access to the production of adulterated images”, says Margarita Martínez, teacher and researcher in Philosophy of technology.
“In that framework,” adds Martínez, “it is no surprise that, from now on, no one trusts an image as documentary evidence. But that only shows that we should never have trusted the image, or that “we must seek mechanisms to guarantee new principles of veridiction.”
But if any evidence can be discussed, then what are the columns where the ideas of historical or documentary truth should be cemented.
“I believe that the mechanisms for discerning between different visual evidence must be reformulated and refined to see which are truly documentary in nature. But past events will not be less or more inaccessible than now. Or does history only work with visual testimonies of the facts? In that case, how do we do ancient history, medieval history? We make it with preserved objects, papers, furniture and written testimonies, for example, among many other documents and instances that intersect. For that matter, even if armed with unsimulated images, is our real life the one we show on a photo network? A smiling and unretouched selfie for the public taken during a sad private scene is a true image, although a false or simulated document regarding an idea of happiness,” Martínez maintains.