Back in June of 1994, there was probably no image more familiar than O.J. Simpson’s mug shot.
I wasn’t quite ten years old at the time, but I vividly remember the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase and his subsequent trial. I also remember a huge controversy that erupted involving TIME Magazine.
When Simpson’s mug shot was released, it was on the cover of virtually every magazine at the time, possibly including Field & Stream and Cat Fancy. When TIME put the mug shot on their cover, they had one of their artists artificially darken Simpson’s complexion.
The backlash was immediate. The main complaint, obviously, was that if TIME’s intent was to make Simpson look sinister or guilty and the way they accomplished that was by making his skin darker, then that was an extremely racist course of action.
The other complaint was that TIME had manipulated reality. The photo was not an accurate depiction of Simpson’s appearance, yet it was plastered on the cover of a trusted news source read by millions of people.
This story got so big that Jim Gaines, TIME’s managing editor at the time, had to issue an apology, or at least an apologetic clarification. Regarding the ethics of manipulating photos, he said the following:
“I felt it lifted a common police mugshot to the level of art, with no sacrifice to truth,” he wrote in part. “Reasonable people may disagree about that. If there was anything wrong with the cover, in my view, it was that it was not immediately apparent that this was a photo-illustration rather than an unaltered photograph; to know that, a reader had to turn to our contents page to see the original mug shot on the opening page of the story. But making that distinction clearer will not end the debate over the manipulation of photographs.”
I definitely agree with that last sentence.
I was thinking about that altered mug shot the other day while I was scrolling Facebook, a service that becomes worse by the hour. Lately, my Facebook feed has been absolutely flooded with AI images.
It started with terrible AI images of elderly women sitting next to ornate cakes. The caption would read something like, “I’m 118 years old and I’m excited to continue my baking journey,” which is presumably the kind of journey where you only need to bring five bucks for gas.
Then I started getting AI images of children who have built incredible things out of trash; for example, a picture of a child who has built a 15-foot-tall photorealistic sculpture of Jesus out of empty water bottles.
All of these photos bear the hallmarks of lazy AI renderings; any text that appears in the image will be blurred and misspelled, and the people depicted usually have more toes or fingers than the national average.
Despite that, these photos get enormous engagement online. True, a lot of the likes and comments are bots, but a lot of them are real people who genuinely believe that a polydactyl child built a breathtaking sculpture of Noah’s ark out of used napkins.
What concerns me is this: if you can trick a lot of people into thinking that bad AI art is authentic, what’s going to happen when AI art gets really, really good?
That day isn’t far off. It hasn’t quite been two years since free AI photo manipulation became widely available on the internet, allowing you to type something like “Snagglepuss police interrogation” into a prompt bar and send hilariously terrible AI art to your friends. But the quality of that art has improved dramatically on a weekly basis, and we’re not too far from a future where AI photos are all but indistinguishable from the real deal.
Obviously, doctored photos are nothing new, and media and politicians spreading doctored photos isn’t new either. Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, perhaps most famous for having his six siblings publicly denounce him while campaigning, widely shared a faked photo of former President Barack Obama shaking hands with the former president of Iran. Donald Trump tweeted a photo of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer altered to show them wearing a hijab and turban. And in 2020, Fox News shared photos of Seattle protests against George Floyd’s death that had been altered to make the protests appear violent (one photo which showed a city block on fire was actually taken in St. Paul, Minnesota).
What is new is that we have two separate phenomena taking place that are going to collide head-on any day now. The first is the arrival of AI images and videos that are indistinguishable from reality. The second is the rise in people getting their news from the same places they get their entertainment.
Walter Cronkite was considered the most trusted man in America when he was the anchor of the CBS Evening News. Can you imagine the sheer chaos that would have unfolded if during every broadcast, he included one story that was a complete fabrication but he never told you which one?
We are already experiencing a society where people cannot often agree on a shared reality. We may soon find ourselves in a situation where even those with the most critical eye cannot be sure what is real and what is fiction.
Like so many major news stories from the pre-9/11 era, the controversy over that doctored O.J. Simpson photo seems almost quaint.
