Podcast
Today, Explained
On the podcast, author Fred Ritchin discussed his book, The Synthetic Eye, which examines the profound transformations artificial intelligence is bringing to photography. Ritchin detailed his decades-long concern that the credibility of images as reliable witnesses is breaking down, emphasizing the danger of losing a shared sense of reality if we cannot trust what we see. He warned that in the near future, realistic images may need to be explicitly labeled as fiction or nonfiction to maintain public trust.
Episode: We can't trust photos anymore
Fred Ritchin's book, "The Synthetic Eye," explores the transformative effects of artificial intelligence on photography and the resulting changes in how we perceive and interpret images.
In the not too distant future, realistic looking images will probably have to be labeled like words as either fiction or nonfiction because it may be impossible to tell them apart.
We may have to rely on the image maker and not the image to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.
I began to think that the credibility of photography as a witness was vulnerable at that point.
And what troubled me then and troubles me even more now is if that breaks down, then we really have no shared sense of reality at this point in terms of what's happening outside of our immediate neighborhood, our immediate family, you know, what's happening in other countries.
So I wrote a piece for the New York Times magazine in 1984. I think they printed a million six hundred thousand copies, as I remember, with the idea that if people know in advance, they'll do something about it so that we will be able to preserve the photograph as a credible witness.