A Forensics Expert on Princess Kate’s Photo—and How Credentialing Tools Can Help Build Trust in a World of Increasing Uncertainty

TIME

Hany Farid, an academic who has spent the past 25 years developing techniques to detect photo manipulation, breaks down the Kate Middleton photo and living in the age of AI.

Transcript

00:00 Princess Kate is right that many amateur photographers and bring their photos into

00:04 Photoshop and hide the app. And I think probably what she did is one of these best take like

00:09 montages where she took a series of photos and she wanted to get the smiling face just right

00:14 for every before all the kids and herself and did a little montaging and then it just all it

00:19 in invariably leaves a few artifacts. And so I was pretty confident at that point that this was

00:25 fairly benign. I understood why the AP pulled it because they have very particular standards.

00:30 But I don't think it was nefarious. I don't think it's a sign that she's dead. I don't think aliens

00:35 have taken over her body and all the crazy nonsense that the internet is coming up with.

00:40 I think this is a classic story of photo editing that was a slightly sloppy. You know, at the end

00:45 of the day, this is a pretty simple story. But what's interesting about it is even though this

00:50 is a story about Photoshop and fairly benign photo editing, it there is the shadow of AI.

00:56 Like if we were living if we weren't living in the generative AI age, I don't think you'd be

01:01 hearing much of what we are hearing. Yeah, I do think that the reason why these conspiracies can

01:07 take hold is because we do live at a time where somebody could have fully fabricated that image,

01:12 or that was a body double and then they replaced her face there. And so this is still an AI story

01:18 to some degree. But I think it really is quite innocuous. We are seeing two things. One is people

01:26 are creating fake images, fake audio, fake video of Trump, of Biden, of Harris, and trying to use

01:31 that to damage them. But they're also doing something else, which is they're using the

01:36 specter of deep fakes to try to dismiss reality. Right? Because if you live in this world where

01:41 anything could be fake, well, the the video of Trump stumbling on his words and calling his wife

01:46 Mercedes, he can just say it's fake. So that's actually very dangerous also is you can deny

01:53 reality when things can be fake. And I think you're seeing both of those around the election.

01:58 And of course, we're seeing the awful content around non consensual sexual imagery. We saw it

02:02 with Taylor Swift, but high school girls every day are now being victims of this. Journalists,

02:08 human rights activists, politicians, people who attract unwanted attention are being victims of

02:14 being inserted into explicit material. People are using it to create child sexual abuse material,

02:18 people are using it to commit commit small to large scale frauds, getting phone calls from

02:23 what seems like your loved ones or talking to your CEO, but it's not it's actually somebody

02:27 who's faking them. So you're seeing really significant weaponization at the individual

02:33 level at the societal level and at the democracy level. And I think it's probably a sign of things

02:38 to come. Individuals have to stop pretending that they can forensically analyze content and be

02:43 reliable at it. You can't this is a really hard job. I do this for a living. It's hard. So what

02:49 you have to realize as a consumer is that you are vulnerable. And you are not going to be able to

02:54 forensically analyze analyze your way out of this. I think we just need to be more thoughtful about

02:59 how we consume information and understand that the journalists have a serious job. And by the way,

03:04 when they get it wrong, there are consequences. And you can't say that about the knuckleheads

03:07 on Twitter. There's no consequence for them. The first approach is what we call reactive approach.

03:12 I wait for the reporter from the Telegraph or BBC to contact me. They send me the photograph. I run

03:16 a battery of tasks, try to figure out what's going on. I let them know. They set the record

03:20 straight. Meanwhile, you know, an entire new cycle has gone by. Right. So it's a relatively slow

03:27 process. We measure that in hours or days. But at the speed of the Internet, you know, that doesn't

03:33 really work. So the proactive technique is that you're the camera itself. So Princess Kate's

03:41 camera, when she took that photo would have said, Ah, this photo was taken on this date and time at

03:46 this location. This is a credential that author that authenticates that. And then as she put that

03:52 into Photoshop, Photoshop would say, Okay, this is what I did the photo, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

03:56 And then when that goes to the AP, AP can look at that content credential. It's manifest, we call it

04:02 and say, ah, okay, this is what happened. This is consistent with our photo editing standards,

04:08 or it is not we will accept it, we will not. And none of this would have happened. Right? If that

04:13 if that existed, and the nice thing about the proactive techniques is you're there at the point

04:17 of creation. Yeah. And as long as those credentials are there, you get to make decisions. Now the

04:23 drawback is, we need those contra credentials in some what 10 billion devices around the world.

04:29 And we need the infrastructure. And so that's going to take a little bit of time. And I think

04:32 at the end of the day, it's going to be a combination of those two solutions. Right?

04:36 The credentials will work. When people like I think in this case, if that Canon camera,

04:41 and that version of Photoshop that Kate had were compliant, I think she wasn't trying to

04:45 fool anybody shoots that dinner photo, then it would have worked perfectly. A dedicated bad actor,

04:50 yeah, they'll find a way around it. And then the reactive techniques that we talked about,

04:54 that's where I come in. So a combination of those two is sort of what you need.

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