00:20:43.780a University of California Berkeley professor who investigates digital manipulation and
00:20:47.360misinformation, who basically said, it doesn't look like AI to me. It looks like somebody just
00:20:52.120used good old-fashioned Photoshop to edit those photos and that they are not AI-generated deep
00:20:57.160fakes. Haney says, I think it is unlikely that this is anything more than a relatively minor
00:21:02.200photo manipulation. There is no evidence that this image is entirely AI-generated.
00:21:07.000So AI or not, the photo had been manipulated so much that it became a violation of most
00:21:13.580newswire services policies. So if you don't know what a newswire is, organizations and institutions
00:21:19.020like Kensington Palace or the United Nations or NASA, they submit photos to newswire services
00:21:25.160and those services basically vet and fact check those photos and then send them all around for
00:21:30.460other media outlets to use. Now, anybody who is submitting a photo to a newswire service
00:21:34.940knows the drill, right? There are very clear and specific rules about how the photos can be edited.
00:21:41.240Like for instance, when it comes to the Associated Press, you cannot even remove red eye from those photos. This is why if you ever want to get, you know, if you ever see pictures on Instagram of like an event or an award ceremony and all the celebrities look perfect and polished, if you go to Getty or go to AP, you can get the real unedited photo.
00:22:00.920And that's how I know that when you're scrolling social media and you're thinking like, oh my God, celebrities, they look so perfect. None of those photos are real. They are putting that edited photo on their Instagram. If you do a side by side of any of those photos, they all tell a very different story. And that is why nobody should compare themselves to what they are seeing on a celebrity's Instagram.
00:22:18.420yeah it it starts to get into like interesting existential questions though like
00:22:23.560if the you know if a celebrity's photo from like an award show has been touched up to like remove
00:22:31.980the red eye and smooth over their pores is it a fake photo i mean like in 2024 what even is a
00:22:38.780photo like i mean i don't want to get i don't want to make it seem like i just did a massive
00:22:42.420bong riff before recording this episode. But I know people who have entirely AI-generated
00:22:49.620headshots on their LinkedIn of images that don't exist, but yet there they are. So I do think we're
00:22:56.280all sort of grappling with some larger existential questions about what is a photo? What is truth?
00:23:02.360What is reality? And I think that this whole Kate Middleton thing really demonstrates that we're in
00:23:07.740this kind of new and precarious territory when it comes to that. So one place where this is not
00:23:14.060precarious is newswire services, because the Associated Press, Getty Images, and Reuters all
00:23:20.020issued kill notices for this photo, which means that they were advising news agencies to remove
00:23:25.060this photo from their archives and from circulation and to not use it at all. I cannot stress to y'all
00:23:30.560how big of a deal this is. In my entire time working at MSNBC, not once did I ever see one
00:23:37.300kill notice. That is how rare it was. The Verge reports that, quote, kill notices are incredibly
00:23:42.600rare and unusual. One wire service source told me they could count on one hand the number of
00:23:48.020kills issued in a year. To give you a sense of scale, AP says it publishes thousands of stories
00:23:52.680a day and a million pictures a year. Getty Images covers 160,000 events annually. That a kill notice
00:23:59.060of this magnitude happened is a big deal. Okay, so that's a pretty big screw up on somebody's part.
00:24:07.300how did this happen? Well, Kate says that she was just like innocently playing with Photoshop
00:24:14.660like we all do. She put out a statement that said, like many amateur photographers, I do
00:24:19.740occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the
00:24:23.760family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy
00:24:27.960Mother's Day. Signed, C. What do you think of that statement? You seem like you have thoughts.
00:24:32.100yeah it's i i can feel the like tendency to want to speculate in world build like happening within
00:24:43.160me in real time here because like my initial reaction to that is why is kate middleton
00:24:50.700taking her own photos and editing her own photos and managing her own social feed
00:24:56.300like is that how it works i would assume that she would have staff to do that it's so funny because
00:25:02.940i had the same exact feeling when i read this statement um one two i kind of almost again and
00:25:11.820this is me like projecting my own whatever onto it i almost kind of like felt this statement was
00:25:17.300sort of like like the the i hope everybody celebrating had a very happy mother's day
00:25:21.780it kind of seems like worry about your own family don't worry about what i'm doing
00:25:25.040you know what i mean yeah it feels like a little bit of a dodge and and it also
00:25:32.160yeah it feels like a dodge it doesn't feel like it's addressing
00:25:35.880the actual like substance of the concern here that's exactly how i felt so as you've said
00:25:44.180unsurprisingly this photo which i feel like was obviously meant to show that kate is like alive
00:25:49.780and doing well, did not accomplish that.
00:28:52.820that it is really important that everybody understands
00:28:56.260and has that trust that what you're seeing
00:28:58.740is broadly true, broadly based in reality.
00:29:01.600But if you and if you don't have that, it further erodes the trust in both institutions and news media. But like, there does seem to be some questions about what that means when the fabric of reality is so easily and often manipulated using technology. And I don't have the answer to that. What do you think?
00:29:22.840Yeah, I think it's, I mean, sign of the times is like, you know, kind of a cliche, but I feel like we're living in a time that's really characterized by lack of trust in institutions.
00:29:39.000and not just lack of trust, but like rapidly declining trust in institutions, as well as
00:29:46.860rapidly declining trust in what we even see, like the images we see on the news and social media.
00:29:56.700Like the idea of a shared reality itself, I think feels pretty tenuous these days. And
00:30:06.540And I guess the story kind of feels like Kate Middleton and the royals perhaps like stepped right into that.
00:30:17.120And, you know, what maybe 10 years ago might have been like a minor story about like royal gossip is now solidly in like the center of this existential information crisis that we're all having about like what what is reality even?
00:30:43.040How do how can we know what what is a photo?
00:30:47.120Exactly. And I think, I don't know that they realized that they were wading into this, into all of these questions by releasing this photo. But I think they, I think that you're right that they really have. And I think that this is some sort of a milestone where it's like, no, we really do need to have an understanding of what reality is. You can't just use technology manipulation to shape reality. We will not accept that. We will not tolerate that.
00:31:13.440Like John Alsop from the Columbia Journalism Review actually wrote a piece where he says that he thinks that this whole debacle is kind of a hopeful sign for our current media climate.
00:31:23.360He writes, yes, much of the discourse around this episode has been untethered from reality, but much of it is actually applied due skepticism to a piece of information that merited it.
00:31:33.140More skepticism, indeed, than credulous recent statements from traditional commenters about the royal family moving into a new golden age of transparency.
00:31:41.440Declining trust in institutions is undoubtedly a problem of our current information age,
00:31:48.900So I think that you're right, that we're sort of grappling with what all of this means,
00:31:53.140but the fact that the wire services pulled it immediately, that the royal family had
00:31:58.980to come out and say, oh, we edited this picture, it's been manipulated, I think does in some
00:32:04.440ways kind of speak to the idea that we're kind of asking and answering those questions
00:32:09.720in real time. But the answer is not just like, you will accept the reality that we present to
00:32:14.500you without question. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it is. Maybe that's the optimistic
00:32:19.040take. I mean, I hope that news agencies and the public and, you know, you and me as well as
00:32:26.940individuals, like all of us, bring this same skepticism to other stories of, you know, that
00:32:35.220have dubious evidence right like it's it is interesting that there is this whole you know
00:32:42.040media brouhaha about kate middleton you know where is she uh honestly is it like an american who
00:32:51.260doesn't follow the royals it just doesn't feel that important like i can see how it is important
00:32:55.360and i you know read an article a little bit ago uh written by uh a britain about like the
00:33:02.320importance of the royals as like a source of stability when their government is feeling very
00:33:08.200unstable. And so like that kind of like made some sense to me. But like in general, it doesn't feel
00:33:12.880that important. And it feels like there are so many other like hugely important media stories
00:33:17.500where there is a lot of fake evidence, fake photos, fake narratives like, you know, the war
00:33:26.160in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the DeSantis campaign released some deep fakes. But, you know, back in
00:33:32.100primary when they were still a thing uh the the like fake robocall that used a deep fake of biden's
00:33:38.340voice all of those stories got so much less airtime than this and you know i guess optimistically
00:33:46.460maybe this big story that's like using the sort of cultural hook of the royals to get people
00:33:54.780thinking and talking about these things, maybe that will kick off kind of a new era of skepticism.
00:34:05.600I hope you're right. And I feel very strongly that it doesn't matter if it's a, like, quote,
00:34:10.860small story or like a cultural story or whatever, or if it's something as big as, you know,
00:34:17.540a ongoing war or conflict. I think that, I've said this on the show before, I'm sure people
00:34:24.200are sick of me saying it, but like the truth is important. The truth matters and we all deserve
00:34:28.520the truth. And so it doesn't matter if it's like a pop culture story that seems quite small or a
00:34:33.180big story. In fact, in my mind, those things are connected. Right. And so I agree with you that
00:34:37.720maybe this is indicative of like how we will be thinking about other, quote, bigger stories of
00:34:44.980media manipulation and how we understand them through this, quote, smaller story. You know,
00:34:51.140Ramak Molavi-Vessayai, a digital rights lawyer and senior researcher at the Mozilla Foundation,
00:34:56.140told CBS something along these lines that I really agreed with.
00:34:59.640Quote, it shows our vulnerability toward content and toward how we make up our realities.
00:35:04.620If we cannot trust what we see, this is really bad.
00:35:07.180Not only do we have already a decrease in trust in institutions, we have a decrease in trust and media.
00:35:13.680We have a decrease in trust even for big tech and for politicians.
00:35:16.860So this part is really bad for democracies and can be destabilizing.
00:35:21.100And so I kind of agree that it doesn't matter if we're talking about, you know, a campaign or a war or a pop culture event.
00:35:29.600But if you if you don't have if people know if trust is no longer a thing that just exists, the entire thing breaks down and the entire thing is destabilizing.
00:35:39.600And democracies are really fragile. And so, like, I think it really does matter.
00:37:57.060And I think, you know, you talked about earlier on the show that when there's a lack of good, reliable information, people like to world build.
00:38:08.360And it's fun to speculate about what might be going on.
00:38:11.680And that is harmful. But then what's even more harmful is when nefarious bad actors with an agenda step into that space and world build in a way that is not just, you know, fun speculation, but intentionally trying to like mislead and push authoritarian narratives.
00:38:33.620Exactly. And this is where I'm kind of like having my own come to Jesus moment. Like everything I'm about to say, I'm saying in a mirror essentially to myself, which is that I am someone who loves pop culture, loves celebrity gossip.
00:38:49.480I read Des Moines. I enjoy that as a pastime, but I do not think that is wholly unconnected
00:38:57.000from the bad actors who are using that very same dynamic to manipulate people and destabilize
00:39:04.260democracies. And so I don't have the answer of where one ends and the other begins, but I think
00:39:09.520we got to ask those questions. And then I think, so you have all these questions about what is
00:39:13.900truth and manipulation, but when you add in the royals, it just takes on another layer. I read
00:39:19.260that piece in the cut that you referenced earlier about how the royal family kind of needs this
00:39:23.660magic to exist as an institution, like a stable institution to survive. And I think that what we
00:39:30.500are seeing right now is that people have really lost trust in the royals as an institution and
00:39:36.940the people who make media and cover the royals and media more broadly. And so I think folks saw
00:39:42.600how Meghan Markle was treated before her and Harry left their royal duties, Prince Andrew's crimes,
00:39:47.300that whole thing. And I think general questions about the place of a monarchy as this holdover
00:39:52.740of harmful colonial legacies has really got people asking some questions about, you know,
00:39:58.720the royals and how they exist. So that magic that they're, that they, the cut piece describes that
00:40:03.560the royal family kind of needs to be working for us all to believe in the institution as something
00:40:10.100that is stable and good, kind of like, isn't really, that magic is really kind of not magicing
00:40:14.540so much. Yeah. And yet, you know, the, the other piece of that, uh, article in the cut was not
00:40:20.280just how the, the Royal family needs the magic to exist, but also how the like British people
00:40:28.060kind of need them to exist. And I, I found that interesting. I, uh, you know, again,
00:40:35.600as an American, it's not something that really resonates with me. Um, but you know, it's,
00:40:42.180it's been a long time since I read anything that was sort of celebrating the idea of a
00:40:47.980constitutional monarchy. It always just seemed like a weird colonial relic to me. But it was
00:40:54.260interesting to read in this modern era that we're in when, you know, survey after survey shows that
00:41:00.360people are open to other forms of government than democracy, which is like, very alarming
00:41:09.380and concerning but it feels like that is a little bit related here as well and this thing with the
00:41:17.080whole Kate Middleton image I think to me really reads like the last gasp of really trying to use
00:41:23.180technology like photoshop to create this reality where people can see the magic have trust in it
00:41:30.500and believe that it exists right and then have it translated back into trust in that institution and
00:41:36.400that as a, like, governing body. Does that make sense? It does make sense in a weird way. And so,
00:41:42.440you know, I think a lot of the tools that the royals and other famous people have to keep this
00:41:48.720machine sort of going, you know, pretty photos, a careful relationship with the media and the
00:41:53.380public, I think those tools are beginning to break down and become less effective in 2024,
00:41:59.400in part because we have the internet, right? People love to be sleuths and hyper-focused on
00:42:03.860images to point out like what's not right with them. None of this is really new. Like onlookers
00:42:08.560have been doing that with the royal family forever, but this new technology and internet
00:42:12.960fueled climate, that is new. So I think these old tools will not work in this new climate.
00:42:19.000As Charlie Warzel puts it at The Atlantic, people have recently lost trust in both the royal family
00:42:24.220as an institution and in the organizations that cover the monarchy, in part due to Prince Harry
00:42:29.280and Meghan Markle's departure from royal life. There is a newfound sense of the royals as conniving
00:42:33.560and manipulative, and the press plays into this. This trust vacuum, when it collides with a still
00:42:38.560new technology such as generative AI, creates the optimal conditions for conspiracy theories to grow.
00:42:44.180It seems clear, at least in the case of the royal family, that the institutions aren't sure how to
00:42:48.880handle any of this. It makes sense then that the two biggest is-it-real-image controversies of the
00:42:54.100past year have centered on figures from archaic cultural political organizations, the papacy and
00:43:00.360the monarchy he's referring to that ai image of the pope wearing a puffer coat which i always say
00:43:05.840like completely fooled me um and it does make sense that like i think that you're right that
00:43:11.920it reflects a larger disillusionment in these arcane political and cultural organizations
00:43:20.940yeah and and also arcane political cultural organizations that have tended to be
00:43:27.720very conservative, right? And I think in the past, one of the ways they maintained power was by
00:43:34.860tightly controlling information. And with social media, that's suddenly so much harder, right? Like
00:43:41.880maybe in the past, you could talk to 20 news outlets and get them all on board. That's not
00:43:47.500the case now. There's, you know, hundreds of millions of people reposting stories all over
00:43:52.120the place uh and yeah then with generative ai and you know lack of confidence in the veracity of
00:44:01.860photos videos audio uh it's a it's a weird time for all of us and yeah it's not surprising that
00:44:11.540it's an especially weird difficult time for these uh storied institutions that have developed most
00:44:21.540of their tools of power from a previous era that feels increasingly ill, leaves them feeling
00:44:30.080increasingly ill-equipped to deal with the current media environment that we're in.
00:44:35.840Yeah. And I mean, to that point, this is loosely related, but I feel like I'm sort of personally
00:44:41.500reckoning with wanting to read all the speculations about what's going on and also being like,
00:44:47.820engaging in this feels icky a little bit, like engaging in speculating about somebody's health
00:44:53.940information feels really wrong to me. And so I think it speaks to how much we as the public
00:44:59.900feel like we are owed information about famous people like the royals. Like on the one hand,
00:45:05.740you might be like, well, that's the drill when you become a royal. And maybe that's true. But
00:45:10.380I do think it speaks to like, when what happens when people feel entitled to information,
00:45:15.340even sensitive health information about people they don't know in a climate where information
00:45:21.760feels so tenuous, so fraught, so easily manipulated. In my research for this episode,
00:45:27.020I did see a level of entitlement around information and ownership of people's
00:45:33.860public selves that I just did not think was healthy. And it is clearly gendered. We'll0.97
00:45:39.600link to a study, but it is very well documented that women public figures face greater criticism
00:45:44.900than male public figures, particularly around health and well-being. Attitudes around health
00:45:52.880and well-being are incredibly gendered. So it feels like a biased, unfair, not equitable
00:45:59.000conversation in general to be speculating on. And I do think there's this strange parasocial
00:46:08.760thing that happens with the royals. When I was doing research for this episode,
00:46:13.580This British tabloid journalist, Liz Jones, published this piece when Kate first left the public eye. The title is, this feels personal. The news Kate is in the hospital has hit me like a young member of my family has been struck down. That is a wild piece to publish. The fact that that was the title of a piece is wild to me because she's not a member of your family. You don't even know this person. It is wild to publish a piece about how this is a personal drama for you, the health issues of someone that you have never even met.
00:46:43.580And so I think that this is another thing that people are just starting to question along with
00:46:47.640these archaic social and political, you know, ruling parties. I think people are starting to
00:46:55.020ask questions about this level of parasocial scrutiny. And is it healthy? And is it something
00:47:00.240that we, you know, and by we, I mean, institutions, media, journalists should even be contributing to.
00:47:06.980And this is just my opinion as like a casual observer of all of this is that, you know,
00:47:11.480I obviously thought that the scrutiny that Meghan Markle faced was not okay. It was really gendered0.98
00:47:16.600and racist because she's a black woman. And I think that you, when you take her as this figure
00:47:21.460that people love to pick apart and beat up on in this really charged way, when you remove her from
00:47:26.820that conversation and all of that scrutiny is sort of being put on Kate, I think it becomes clear,
00:47:31.620like just how much that scrutiny is, like how much that weighs, you know? Although I will say
00:47:38.160in researching this episode, I did see a few pieces where they quote like sources close to
00:47:43.780Kate who basically blame Meghan Markle for what's going on with Kate. They're like, oh,
00:47:48.640all those horrible interviews that Meghan Markle put out. And Kate just has to wait to see when0.64
00:47:53.280the next horrible Meghan Markle interview will drop. That would make anybody ill. And so it's
00:47:57.920like, damn, even when Meghan Markle is not even in the mix anymore, you guys cannot help blaming0.98
00:48:02.840her you cannot help like keeping her name in your mouth even when she is not there my god0.98
00:48:08.300yeah i mean like you said it's it's gendered it's just focused on the two women exactly like
00:48:14.120gendered and racialized because it obviously frames megan as like being to blame not to0.96
00:48:20.060mention that you have the same media figures who like would write these really nasty racist pieces0.86
00:48:26.020about megan now saying oh kate deserves privacy and empathy you know the double standard becomes
00:48:31.580really obvious and let's be clear both of them deserve that same empathy and privacy so just a
00:48:39.040side note is that um my girl sophie from cool zone media and i were talking about this via text
00:48:44.520yesterday that she was like isn't it funny how people are saying megan markle needs to speak up
00:48:49.580for kate and what a bad take like she sure doesn't if she doesn't want to get involved in this and1.00
00:48:55.860just wants to mind her business she absolutely should the idea that she should be like sticking
00:49:00.660up for anybody to me is wild and just like really confirm some of my thoughts about the, how people0.81
00:49:07.940feel owed to the labor and like public morality of black women sometimes, even when they have
00:49:12.940done nothing to earn that. So yeah, all of this is to say, I do, I think that we are really in
00:49:19.020an interesting space when it comes to both the royals, how we think about them, how we talk
00:49:23.600about them, how we think and talk about these archaic ruling systems in general, and what all
00:49:31.520that means in 2024 in the context of things like generative AI, photo manipulation, and media
00:49:37.160manipulation more broadly. I don't really have the answers, but it does seem like this feels like
00:49:42.280a line in the sand for the fact that people are really asking these questions and that
00:49:48.280the party line of, you will accept the reality that we present to you and you will not question
00:49:53.360And that is not working for any of us.
00:49:55.760Yeah, it'll be real curious, you know, a year or two from now to look back and see, like, was this that kind of event that was something of an inflection point about how we think about photos and evidence and news sources?
00:51:45.620For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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