Fake pictures that look real, and real pictures that look fake
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These days, there's a lot of talk about photographs that were made with AI algorithms. The problem, or so we are led to believe, is that they look so real that we can't tell that they are fake. Germany's Der Spiegel magazine currently has a lengthy article about it (haven't read it, given it's behind their paywall).
I personally am not too concerned about this problem. After all, especially in the world of journalism, photographs never exist on their own. If we have proper journalism (I know, big if, I'll get to that in a moment), then this problem should more or less disappear. Of course, for all kinds of reasons we might not have proper journalism (mostly, it's money, in particular a lack thereof). Maybe that's what that German magazine should write about? But I guess it's harder to sell magazines that aren't focused on some catchy-populist idea?
Regardless, that's all very boring -- unlike this photograph. I had seen it many times before. But when I looked it up again today, it made me laugh again.
If you're a photographer, of course you know why the picture looks the way it looks. If you're not a photographer (or you don't know your tools), you can read about it here.
Ignoring that this picture is funny, there's something else going on here. Remember, with AI photographs the problem is that they look real but are not based in reality. The Carter-Biden picture is based in reality, but it looks fake. Or maybe "fake" isn't even the right word. It doesn't look right. The Bidens aren't giants who decided to visit the Carters who happen to be very small (the internet tells me that Joe Biden is 6ft or 183cm tall, meaning he's 3.5in or 9cm shorter than I am).
If you've been following the news, you probably know who Yevgeny Prigozhin is. If you haven't: he's the head of the Russian Wagner organization, which from all that has recently emerged basically was Vladimir Putin's private army (it's responsible for huge numbers of war crimes in Ukraine, Syria, and in a number of African countries, for example in Mali). The organization is also responsible for the 2016 election interference in the US, which is why Prigozhin is wanted by the FBI (not making this up).
Anyway, Prigozhin just attempted to run a putsch in Russia, which didn't work out so well. Putin turned against him and had a criminal investigation started (an interesting concept: to have someone you finance and support criminally investigated).
You might not be interested in any of this, but we're now getting to the pictures. It's not absolutely clear to me whether all of the photographs taken in Prigozhin's mansion were leaked or released officially. I personally don't think it matters. Apart from a number of passports, gold bars, a lot of cash, the investigators also found a set of wigs, and they found these pictures (see above).
Or did they? Are these photographs real? Or are they fakes designed to slander the reputation of a man that has now fallen from grace?
This is an interesting problem, isn't it?
Let's start out by noting that the photographs look ridiculous. Or rather what they depict looks ridiculous. These disguises look like they're straight out of, say, a Borat movie.
If the photos are real, in part they look the way they look for similar reasons than why the Bidens looked like giants next to the Carters: some smartphone's front-facing camera produced these rather lofi looking pictures (that, I might add, we're used to seeing, given we take and see them all the time).
If the photos are not real (which is the more interesting option), then someone very cleverly thought about how to create them first. Or maybe there was some AI involved. But the task at hand was not to produce perfect pictures (that nobody would believe in anyway: how or why would Prigozhin have a professional photographer on hand to document his disguises?). Instead, they needed to produce pictures that replicate the various shortcomings of a smartphone's front-facing camera.
If you've followed along this Mailing List for a while, you can probably tell why this particular problem is a lot more interesting to me than the usual AI cases. It's intriguing, very funny, and eerie.
"The bad lighting," an article in The Guardian concludes, "awkward and inconsistent selfie angles seem to suggest they might be authentic, although it is difficult to be sure."
This is a photograph where we know the full story. It's from the East German Stasi archives, and it was included in a project by Simon Menner that compiles such photographs. There's a book that's out of print, but you can easily find copies for around $20 online (I just checked).
The book sits at the intersection of the ludicrous and the terrifying -- much like the Prigozhin pictures.
Honestly, if you were an artist you'd be unable to come up with anything like this. A fictional evil organization that uses photographs will never be as unsettling as a real evil organization that uses photographs.
I'm thinking it's the fact that the photographs show that even the most evil people are still human beings. That's a hard pill to swallow. But we've seen many cases where it was exactly that fact that made photographs so terrifying (remember the photograph of the laughing SS people at Auschwitz?).
All of this is to say that there is more to photography and fakeness. It's good to be aware of photographs being made to look real even though they are not. But it's also important to be aware of photographs that are real even though they either don't look real or they look too ridiculous to be real.
In the end, I would argue, it all comes down to what we want to believe in. This aspect of photography is almost never considered when veracity comes up: often, people believe a photograph is real even though it's clearly fake (or it doesn't show what it's supposed to show) because they want to believe in it.
This is not a new phenomenon at all. And we don't even have to dive into politics for it. We don't accept some pictures even though they're clearly real (I've never met anyone who likes their passport picture -- try telling the person checking your passport at the airport that that's not you), and we accept other pictures even though they're not real, or they maybe distort a complex reality to a very small part (just think about the kinds of family photographs people share).
That's photography for you.
Or rather: that's how we engage with photography.
With that, I'm going to conclude for today. I'll have to look after one of the cats that gets to sit outside every morning (in an enclosed little "cabana"). It's barely past 10 in the morning here, and it's already quite hot and humid. It's going to be another sweltering day.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg