An AI-generated image of the Pope has fooled the internet. What will actually remain of real photography in the future?
Too good to be wrong: Pope Francis in cool – thanks to AIReddit
A few days ago, a photo of Pope Francis made the rounds of digital loops on social media platforms. He can be seen in a kind of semi-profile and walks past the camera, which captures him from a few meters away.
The special feature: His bulky, white down jacket. It is tied at the waist with a white ribbon, also called a cincture, that is also iridescent. The Pope in a trendy cassock. A sight that caused ridicule and enthusiasm, but in any case a lot of attention.
But the head of the Catholic Church had never worn the jacket. They don’t even exist. Rather, the image is one of the products of an artificial image generator that has been making headlines again and again since the launch of the OpenAI tool Dall-E last year. A photo of Donald Trump’s alleged arrest, for example, triggered a brief but heated debate.
And Franziska Giffey even got involved in a video call with a scammer disguised as Vitali Klitschko. The photo of Pope Francis is much more harmless in comparison. Nevertheless – or precisely because of this: It is one of the first times that an artificially created photo has gone viral and that it has remained undetected as a fake for so long. It raises the question of what will actually remain of real photography in the future?
All of this is not entirely new. From a media-historical point of view, there are justified doubts about the conjuration of the unprecedented. For one thing, today’s image generators are just another step up the high ladder of image manipulation techniques. Above all, however, the mere evidentiary value of photos has always been more fragile than is often assumed. However, this is less due to the possibilities of subsequent processing of images than through the choice of moment and section.
Only through the trappings do photos get their meaning
How tedious, if not impossible, it is, especially in politically sensitive contexts, to draw conclusions about the situation represented from a single photo can be read time and time again in the long, deliberative reports by the Bellingcat research network. They make it clear how little a single photo actually proves.
Above all, they show how much our image perception depends on their framing. We have always looked at photos in interaction with their surroundings – the album, the sideboard, the headline, the timeline. The bon mot of the picture, which goes back to Kurt Tucholsky and says more than a thousand words, is not entirely true. According to author and photographer Teju Cole, the equation doesn’t quite add up. Only through the trappings do photos get their meaning. Wacky messages are often not even dependent on allegedly fake images. It’s enough to take them out of their context.
And yet, with the rapid spread of AI-generated photos, something fundamentally new is on the horizon. A few months ago, Clemens Setz wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that his daughter was growing up in a world in which real and digitally calculated images could hardly be distinguished. The difference itself will probably be considered “old-fashioned and obsolete”. What would that mean for the essence, for the effects of real photography?
Fake Photos: Too good to be fake
In his seminal study Another Way of Telling, John Berger argued that photographs do not just contain information – the family on the beach, the dinner at the restaurant. They always linked these to ideas – order, prosperity and so on. These ideas allowed us to connect moments from far away and the past with our present.
In the same way, AI images can also bridge fiction and reality. Because the photo of Pope Francis does not only work because his facial expressions and gestures look deceptively real. Rather, it fits seamlessly into the image of a Catholic church that is anything but at a loss for a magnificent staging. And that’s why it often became the subject of mocking memes. The pope in a bright down coat as a motif for ironically outdoing comments. It was too good to be wrong.
Nevertheless, photos are more than visual confirmations of existing certainties. They can also challenge and irritate our understandings. From time to time we can discover something in them that we do not expect, that even goes against our ideas, maybe even steers them down completely new paths. Roland Barthes called this moment of enlightening confusion when looking at a photo Punctum.
The technology is not yet fully developed
The AI image of the Pope also contains irritations. The hands are surprisingly smooth for an 86-year-old man. The seams of the puffer jacket are not entirely parallel above the cingulum. And shouldn’t the chain on which the crucifix hangs be recognizable on both sides? These are all small technical mishaps. But, crucially, they lead nowhere. They don’t tell us anything except that the technology isn’t fully developed yet.
This is exactly where artificial intelligence reaches its limits. Their essence is based on the calculation of probabilities, their tool is statistics, their world consists of databases. The accidental, unintended (and not #-marked), which creeps into the translation of space and time into light and shadow or into pixels, inevitably stays away from her. She rearranges familiar things. But it doesn’t create anything new.
That doesn’t always have to be a problem. Stock photos, for example, will probably be created more and more artificially in the future, even if agencies like Getty Images are still fighting back. This can have drastic effects on the labor market. As consumers of the images, however, we will soon hardly be able to tell the difference.
We need more skepticism about their evidence
For photography, the arrival of artificial intelligence means that we should come to a new understanding of its functions and modes of action. We need more skepticism, more distrust of their evidence. And more openness to their surprising, knowledge-promoting potential.
We can never fully grasp reality. No medium demonstrates this as clearly as photography, which always captures more than the participants in front of and behind the camera have in mind. Pictures like that of the Pope with the radiant down jacket, on the other hand, only show us what we already suspected. They make us think we’ve seen it all before. This is perhaps the greatest illusion.