Fakes, Deep and Shallow

Jonas Bendiksen’s wrote a photojournalistic essay, The Book of Veles. The eponymous Veles is a highly impoverished town in Macedonia; and Bendiksen had taken photos of the town, residents in different parts, and included quotes from some of those folks. Except It was all fake.

 

Nicholas Carr describes what Bendiksen had done:

“He shot pictures of empty buildings and deserted cityscapes, and when he returned home to Norway he used video-game-production software to transform the images into three-dimensional renderings. He then downloaded digitized, 3D images of models from the web and placed them inside the scenes, carefully adjusting their poses, clothing, and lighting to make everything look as realistic as possible.”

Wait, there’s more. Even the words in the book are fake – Bendiksen didn’t write them. He used computer programs that generate text instead!

 

Bendiksen wasn’t a fraud. Rather, he was trying to test these questions:

“I started to ask myself the question — how long will it take before we start seeing “documentary photojournalism” that has no other basis in reality than the photographer’s fantasy and a powerful computer graphics card? Will we be able to tell the difference? How hard is it to do?”

When nobody called him out, he set up a fake Twitter account calling the book a fake. It didn’t make a dent – nobody noticed the accusations.

 

Scary, right? Carr agrees:

“The fact that no one spotted the forgery underscores just how easy it is to fool people, even experts. We humans want to believe whatever’s presented to our senses through the media, particularly when it takes the form of images.”

 

All of the above are what is called a “deep fake”. A lot of effort and tools go into the manipulation.

“In creating beautiful photographs that subvert the documentary tradition of photography and call into question our assumptions about how we perceive reality, Bendiksen has opened a door onto a weird and unsettling future. “Beauty is truth,” wrote Keats, and as we all know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

 

Even more worryingly, “shallow fakes” work t00 – and they take little effort:

“Photos don’t need to be doctored to mislead. They need only be placed into a false context.”

Tim Harford makes the same point when he writes:

“The camera may not be lying, but the caption is. Such “recontextualised media” are ideally suited to social sharing. TikTok’s main function, for example, is to make it easy to edit then share clips of media, stripped of their original context.”

Video game footage is shown nowadays as evidence of what’s going on in Ukraine. A photo of rioters attacking police in one country is shown as evidence of hooliganism in a different country. The list is endless. Shallow fakes are so easy. And yet they are convincing.

 

Harford goes on to point an additional problem that deep and shallow fakes create. Even if you’re aware that they exist, you cannot be sure what is fake and what is real:

“We must remember that indiscriminate disbelief is at least as damaging as indiscriminate belief. It might seem smart to reject every claim as potential disinformation...”

But what then are left with to believe in? Whatever aligns with our beliefs and ideologies. No wonder then that everyone is so polarized.