Can We Still Trust Our Eyes?

The world has a trust issue. For nearly two hundred years photographic images have been considered largely trustworthy sources of information as well as a means of human creative expression. But ask yourself this: Do you still trust what you see on the internet? I know, "it's the internet you say", of course I don't." But just in the past couple years it has become MUCH worse has it not? Can we even believe our own eyes? The unfettered (even encouraged) rise of artificial intelligence created images that are allowed, often intended, to mimic real life is a problem of man's creation. We made these machines that have spewed out billions of images that have caused all of us to question the authenticity of every image now. Companies such as Adobe have actively encouraged this desecration when they have published advertisements telling companies to "skip the shoot". The have literally been pushing to destroy an entire industry that helped create Adobe into the enormous (montstrous?) company that it is today.

It should never have been allowed to happen. The best we can do is try to minimize some of the damage. The camera manufacturers need to spearhead this. Nikon has announced that it will have an "Authenticiy Service" built around the C2PA Content Credentials Standard. A digital certificate is applied to each camera and embedded in each image. Additionally the editing process maintains a history of the changes made in post-production. But apparently this requires using C2PA compliant software. Ironically, Adobe is one of the companies that helped create this, and apparently Photoshop and Lightroom are compliant. Photoshop of course, was the pioneer in photo editing who made us question what we were seeing in the first place. i.e. "Photoshopped".

Other manufacturers such as Sony and Canon are also working on similar projects for future camera models, but of course this does nothing for the millions of cameras without such technology. And, bear in mind, Japanese camera manufactures have shown a general disdain for software improvements and appear to think that the internet is a fad. They sell millions of cameras each year that seem to be stuck in the year 1990. They usually cannot connect to wireless, never mind the internet, and force photographers to save images on a memory card.

So while I do think the camera manufacturers are in the right position to help fix the issue, I remain skeptical. This is an industry that has hemorrhaged customers ever since the invention of mobile phone cameras and has yet to adequately respond.

We may need comprehensive legislation to deal with the issue. The problem, naturally, is that few legislators in the world have enough knowledge about the issue to even provide a legislative framework. I do hope that they will allow leaders in the photographic industry to have a significant input. Photographers are the people whose very livelihood is impacted by the abomination of fake images. In the end, however, all of us have a stake in this issue. It is time that an attempt is made to restore some measure of faith in the images that we all see.