NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump getting gang-tackled by riot-gear-clad New York City police officers. Russian President Vladimir Putin in prison grays behind the bars of a dimly lit concrete cell.
The highly detailed, sensational images have inundated Twitter and other platforms in recent days, amid news that Trump faces possible criminal charges and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin.
Images created by Eliot Higgins with the use of artificial intelligence show a fictitious skirmish with Donald Trump and New York City police officers posted on Higgins' Twitter account, as photographed on an iPhone on Thursday in Arlington, Va. The highly detailed, sensational images, which are not real, were produced using a sophisticated and widely accessible image generator.
But neither visual is remotely real. The images — and scores of variations littering social media — were produced using increasingly sophisticated and widely accessible image generators powered by artificial intelligence.
Misinformation experts warn the images are harbingers of a new reality: waves of fake photos and videos flooding social media after major news events and further muddying fact and fiction at crucial times for society.
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"It does add noise during crisis events. It also increases the cynicism level," said Jevin West, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who focuses on the spread of misinformation. "You start to lose trust in the system and the information that you are getting."
While the ability to manipulate photos and create fake images isn't new, AI image generator tools by Midjourney, DALL-E and others are easier to use. They can quickly generate realistic images — complete with detailed backgrounds — on a mass scale with little more than a simple text prompt from users.
Some of the recent images have been driven by this month's release of a new version of Midjourney's text-to-image synthesis model, which can, among other things, now produce convincing images mimicking the style of news agency photos.
In one widely-circulating Twitter thread, Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism collective, used the latest version of the tool to conjure up scores of dramatic images of Trump's fictional arrest.
The visuals, which have been shared and liked tens of thousands of times, showed a crowd of uniformed officers grabbing the Republican billionaire and violently pulling him down onto the pavement.
Higgins, who was also behind a set of images of Putin being arrested, put on trial and then imprisoned, says he posted the images with no ill intent. He even stated clearly in his Twitter thread that the images were AI-generated.
Still, the images were enough to get him locked out of the Midjourney server, according to Higgins. The San Francisco-based independent research lab didn't respond to emails seeking comment.
"The Trump arrest image was really just casually showing both how good and bad Midjourney was at rendering real scenes," Higgins wrote in an email. "The images started to form a sort of narrative as I plugged in prompts to Midjourney, so I strung them along into a narrative, and decided to finish off the story."
He pointed out the images are far from perfect: in some, Trump is seen, oddly, wearing a police utility belt. In others, faces and hands are clearly distorted.
But it's not enough that users like Higgins clearly state in their posts that the images are AI-generated and solely for entertainment, says Shirin Anlen, media technologist at Witness, a New York-based human rights organization that focuses on visual evidence.
Too often, the visuals are quickly reshared by others without that crucial context, she said. Indeed, an Instagram post sharing some of Higgins' images of Trump as if they were genuine garnered more than 79,000 likes.
"You're just seeing an image, and once you see something, you cannot unsee it," Anlen said.
In another recent example, social media users shared a synthetic image supposedly capturing Putin kneeling and kissing the hand of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The image, which circulated as the Russian president welcomed Xi to the Kremlin this week, quickly became a crude meme.
It's not clear who created the image or what tool they used, but some clues gave the forgery away. The heads and shoes of the two leaders were slightly distorted, for example, and the room's interior didn't match the room where the actual meeting took place.
With synthetic images becoming increasingly difficult to discern from the real thing, the best way to combat visual misinformation is better public awareness and education, experts say.
"It's just becoming so easy and it's so cheap to make these images that we should do whatever we can to make the public aware of how good this technology has gotten," West said.
Higgins suggests social media companies could focus on developing technology to detect AI-generated images and integrate that into their platforms.
Twitter has a policy banning "synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media" with the potential to deceive or harm. Annotations from Community Notes, Twitter's crowd-sourced fact checking project, were attached to some tweets to include the context that the Trump images were AI-generated.
When reached for comment Thursday, the company emailed back only an automated response.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, declined to comment. Some of the fabricated Trump images were labeled as either "false" or "missing context" through its third-party fact-checking program, of which the AP is a participant.
Arthur Holland Michel, a fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York who is focused on emerging technologies, said he worries the world isn't ready for the impending deluge.
He wonders how deepfakes involving ordinary people — harmful fake pictures of an ex-partner or a colleague, for example — will be regulated.
"From a policy perspective, I'm not sure we're prepared to deal with this scale of disinformation at every level of society," Michel wrote in an email. "My sense is that it's going to take an as-yet-unimagined technical breakthrough to definitively put a stop to this."
From film to AI-powered images: How the photography industry has changed over time
From film to AI-powered images: How the photography industry has changed over time
Many early photography professionals would likely struggle to conceptualize a handheld camera in the hands of nearly every U.S. citizen, let alone the added capacity to create videos, time-lapses, and panoramas instantly with the click of a button.
Today, most of us carry a highly advanced camera at all times, with the unprecedented ability to photograph, edit, and share swiftly. Getting to this level of sophistication took many decades and followed some truly incredible innovations from engineers and photographers throughout the 20th century.
Early on, the first step to capturing an image was using a camera obscura, which translates to "dark chamber" in Latin. The tool could project images onto a surface but lacked the light-sensitive plate to retain that image, so artists would trace the final pictures onto surfaces.
When Joseph Nicéphore Niépce paired this technology with a pewter plate coated with light-sensitive bitumen to capture a landscape, an enduring image was born in 1826. From there, more innovations in photography came in rapid succession, from daguerreotypes (which yielded detailed images) to calotypes (which decreased exposure time to mere seconds) to a wet collodion process (which was even faster and more detailed).
While many incremental steps were taken, the progress that got us to this point was largely spurred by Kodak. Its invention of the film camera, and subsequent innovations toward disposable cameras, brought photography out of the darkroom and into the home. In doing so, they created an entirely new mass market, introducing average Americans to the pastime of preserving everyday moments and events, which they coined "Kodak moments."
The consumer demand that followed led to a century of reinvention. Giggster delved into five ways the photography industry has shifted over time using sources from across the internet, including the Smithsonian Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.
From 35mm film to digital cameras; from mailing in disposable cameras for development to instant prints; from raw images to heavily edited ones, the photography industry has consistently and rapidly evolved over the past decades. With the advent of cellphone cameras, instantaneous digital photography and editing are more popular than ever, and as the world moves ever onward, more developments are already on the horizon.
Innovation powers the industry
From the second half of the 19th century until today, cameras have become nearly unrecognizable due to transformative developments. Toward the end of the 19th century, Kodak began manufacturing roll-film cameras, trying out many frame sizes until 35mm became the industry standard.
Around the same time, the Ready Fotografer pinhole camera was introduced as the first disposable camera. It used an accordion-like paper box, allowing light to form an image on a plate. Disposable or returnable cameras gained a massive surge in popularity seven decades later during the 1970s when brands such as Kodak, Fuji, and Technicolor raced against each other to create an ever-cheaper but high-quality model.
The first digital camera was developed in 1975 by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson, with a resolution of 0.01 megapixels, and took 23 seconds to take a photo. Digital cameras overtook disposables in popularity thanks to the development of the CCD light sensor that essentially replaced the film's job within the camera. Today's phones boast 200-megapixel cameras to help put the advancement into perspective.
Big photo brands rise—and fall
During the reign of disposable cameras in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, photography giants like Kodak, Polaroid, and Fuji constantly tried to outdo each other in developing new and improved models. However, not all these brands have survived the transition to the 21st century's digital revolution.
In 2012, Kodak—once a company synonymous with photography and in control of 70% of the U.S. film market—filed for bankruptcy. The company's downfall was its refusal to believe the growing trend toward digital photography should be taken seriously, neglecting to develop new options for consumers.
Similarly, the Polaroid company, which once controlled about 66% of the U.S. instant camera market in the 1970s, filed for bankruptcy in the 2000s after failing to evolve with the digital revolution. After years of ignoring the popularity of digital cameras like the ones produced by Canon or Nikon, Polaroid finally found itself facing its demise and eventually shut down production by 2008.
Photos became an integral part of mass media
The 1930s through the '50s saw a "golden age of photojournalism" in the United States, as the government commissioned photographs of the public programs it had created in response to the Great Depression. It set a precedent for documenting not just historical events, but also personal moments in the lives of famous and influential figures.
Through the lens of government-commissioned photographers like Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans, the public saw indelible images of life in America, which the government then offered to newspapers and magazines across the country at no cost.
Magazines like Life, Look, and Fortune grew from this early age of photojournalism. Their production demanded a steady supply of photos to entertain readers. Besides America's first family, the public was eager to witness war, world events, and Hollywood's glamor printed on their pages. Televisions were not yet a fixture in every American's home. With radio as the de facto news and entertainment source, these magazines and newspapers offered the only available visual coverage.
Photographers extensively captured the Great Depression throughout the 1930s, allowing readers in New York to see the hardships in the Dust Bowl with their own eyes. Similarly, photographers provided a constant pipeline between the public and Washington during the presidency of John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. They regularly documented the lives of the president and first lady Jackie Kennedy—both in front of and behind White House doors.
Corporations now dominate much of the industry
Passport photos, stock photos, graduation photos, and nearly every other photography need are now mainly in the hands of large corporations. JCPenney, Walmart, CVS, and other chains offer quick, efficient photo studio services. Getty Images has dominated the stock photo business for decades, currently sitting on an archive of over 350 million images.
While big corporations run many aspects of the photography world—Sony, Nikon, and Canon, to name a few—their growth and future are fueled by the creativity and entrepreneurialism of individuals and small businesses, including wedding photography and school portraits. However, these photo giants are increasingly impeding creatives from making steady earnings, especially when taking hefty royalty fees for licensing out their work.
The digital revolution continues with AI use in photography
Since the shift away from film in the late 20th century, innovators have quickly taken advantage of digital photography's possibilities. Digital technology offers photography, editing, and sharing on larger scales and faster timelines than ever before. It also allows for almost unbelievable manipulation capabilities.
Tools like Luminar AI, Pixlr, Ribbet, and the giant Adobe Photoshop now even use artificial intelligence to help streamline the work of removing backgrounds, upscaling low-resolution images, and detecting faces. Image companies are continually advancing the depths to which photographers can edit and enhance their work: Photo editing software is projected to balloon to a $1.48 billion market by 2027.
Today, the term "photo" spans definitions, from a raw, unprocessed image to a heavily manipulated and altered piece of art, leading to debates on whether both merit the title "photograph"—or another title entirely.
This story originally appeared on Giggster and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
