mobrec

Around 15 years ago I wrote a blog post about the need for a labeling system for images online. I jokingly compared it to the fruit juice labeling system in the US that distinguishes how much actual juice is in the product from 100% to none at all (essentially colored, flavored sugar water).

I wrote that when the world was at the cusp of everyone having a digital camera of some sorts and what started out as a digital photo was then photochopped beyond recognition. Now you don’t even need to have a camera or photochop, you can just have genAI generate janky images plagiarized from all over the internet.

In the podcast, Boris Eldagsen describes how he generated an image without a camera and submitted it to a Sony PHOTO competition and it won. He then pointed out that the image was, in fact, not a photo and refused to accept the award. Sony declined to admit that they made an error in accepting a generated image as a photo (but later changed the submission rules).