With a few prompts, artificial intelligence might have produced an even better photo. Make Donald Trump’s head bigger and move it to centre frame. No pole skewering the secret service agent on the left and distracting from the former president’s raised arm.
The other extraordinary image from the shooting that day could have been improved by making the grey line captured by Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Doug Mills more bullet-like.
But then both would have failed as iconic photos. The reason why Mills and Evan Vucci’s original shots are so powerful is precisely because we know they are real. There were endless interviews and accounts that confirmed it.
That humans still obsess about authenticity is amazing. We are told the world is heading the other way and besides, caveat emptor. And yet the EU said last Friday that the selling of verifications by social media site X breached its online content rules because users could be “deceived” by malicious actors.
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Little blue ticks for goodness sake? Or see the fuss in March when the Duchess of Cambridge fessed up to tinkering with a family snap. Despite ubiquitous fakeness, we really do care. The alignment of Princess Charlotte’s sleeve dominated the news for days.
It is as if we sense that defending the genuine is essential, no matter how small or frivolous the breach. Capitalism survives on trust, as do democracies. Once you allow edits to a PDF, as it were, all bets are off: economic and financial data can quickly become meaningless, election results also.
The trouble is that new technologies are making the real deal trickier to spot. Generative AI mimics poets. Only photoluminescence spectroscopy can tell lab-grown diamonds from mined ones. Men lust after my Audemars Piguet watch, which is a copy.
Theory says the demand for authentic things should decline if the quality of substitutes rises. However, it seems the opposite is true: better fakes are pushing us to revere the real thing more. The market value of luxury goods maker LVMH is five times what it was just over a decade ago.
No one really wants to read AI-penned sonnets. And good luck when your fiancee learns that the three-carat sparkler in her engagement ring was mass produced in India. The problem, however, is that fake will soon be the default assumption.
Unless, of course, there’s provenance to show otherwise. Just as no one doubts the source of those Trump images, verification becomes the defining necessity of our age. Welcome to a second-derivative world – where doing it is less important than proving it.
We see signs of this happening already. Think of those “making of” epilogues on wildlife documentaries. I used to consider them self-indulgent and spoilers of the magic. Soon we’ll be forced to watch the making of the making of, I would sneer.
But Sir David Attenborough was ahead of the game, as ever. Without those behind-the-scenes videos, why believe anything that has come before? A bob of seals chasing a great white shark out to sea? Okay then, maybe that did happen.
Proving our bona fides is the price we now have to pay to maintain legitimacy and trust. Thank goodness we still value both
The art business has long understood the value of provenance. Just saying that a work is a Cy Twombly has never been enough. Other industries must now improve their verification game quickly. Not just natural diamond sellers – food and clothing manufacturers, for example, need to do so, too.
Professional services, as well. Conflicts of interest look doubly bad when authenticity is prized – hello, ratings agencies and accounting firms – as does an absence of skin in the game. Nor will we trust data and algorithms blindly for much longer. Black boxes must be opened.
Finance executives should also take note. Provenance-savvy investors will become ever warier of published financials. Last year, company-defined tweaks lifted S&P 500 profits by almost a third versus standard accounting numbers, according to Calcbench data. Expect pushback on adjusted earnings.
But it is not only artists and businesses who must come up with strategies to prove authenticity. We all need to. From high school students writing essays for sceptical teachers to those of us who work from home.
Indeed just last month US bank Wells Fargo sacked more than a dozen employees for simulating “keyboard activity” to “create the impression of active work”. A funny tale, yes. But also a portent of where we are heading.
Bosses (and colleagues) have never believed in working from home – that people really make an effort when a telly or fridge beckons. So monitoring how often a mouse is jiggled was an obvious response. But home workers need to do more to prove they aren’t faking it.
Install an always-on camera. Wear a tracker. Musicians can film themselves writing a song, as Taylor Swift does. Unless a novelist releases keystroke metadata alongside their new book, we may assume ChatGPT wrote it.
Such intrusions seem Orwellian. But proving our bona fides is the price we now have to pay to maintain legitimacy and trust. Thank goodness we still value both, at least. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
