I made this point on Threads and Nilay's response was "yes making visual lies trivial to make is bad". It's never been photos that made "truth", it's been the source of the photos. You trust a photo from a photojournalist. You don't trust a photo from some rando in your social feed.
>You trust a photo from a photojournalist. You don't trust a photo from some rando in your social feed.
The problem is, this isn't highly true.
Sometimes we don't trust photos from some journalists, not necessarily because we think it is dramatically edited, but we know even professionals have been caught mildly editing, either in-camera or with tools afterward.
Conversely - sure, we don't trust when we see a photo from a rando slandering a politician, unless we want to believe it. At the same time, we mostly believe a rando photo of a fireman rescuing a cat. The latter is less likely to be fake, and if it is, the consequences of believing it are less severe.
Trust heuristics are complex and highly psychological.
I would add that, at least historically, a reputable photojournalist wouldn't likely build a very successful career on faked photos. It's heavily disincentivized. The time and effort required to build the necessary skills and clout won't casually be wasted by a professional. And if and when it does happen that a photojournalist is caught in a lie, the rest are quick to reject it, because it damages their own reputations and livelihoods.
But now, there's little to stop anyone from producing images depicting anything, and we've seen how systems that are blind to ethics can be manipulated into disseminating such images at a speed and scale that far outpaces fact-checking. Professional standards and traditional gatekeeping have no power against it.
