No one’s ready for this

Society has long hinged on photographs (and video) to give us the truth. When authorities concealed reality or it was too far away to understand, photos and videos told us the truth.

If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express

Sure there has been fake photos and video, but they’ve been the exception. But that’s all about to change.

the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after

No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus

Here’s how the product folks building this stuff think about it:

the group product manager for the Pixel camera described the editing tool as “help[ing] you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond.” A photo, in this world, stops being a supplement to fallible human recollection, but instead a mirror of it.

So photos are just our own hallucinations? Because human memory is not very good.