You Can't Trust Your Eyes To Tell You What's Real Anymore, Says Instagram Head (theverge.com) 66
Instagram head Adam Mosseri closed out 2025 by acknowledging what many have long suspected: the era of trusting photographs as accurate records of reality is over, and the platform he runs will need to fundamentally adapt to an age of "infinite synthetic content."
In a slideshow posted to Instagram, Mosseri wrote that for most of his life he could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened, adding that this is clearly no longer the case. He predicted a shift from assuming what we see is real by default to starting with skepticism and paying attention to who is sharing something and why.
In a slideshow posted to Instagram, Mosseri wrote that for most of his life he could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened, adding that this is clearly no longer the case. He predicted a shift from assuming what we see is real by default to starting with skepticism and paying attention to who is sharing something and why.
I have only one rule (Score:3)
Anything digital can be manipulated and has to be verified.
Depending on how much it matters, of course.
Re:I have only one rule (Score:5, Interesting)
Has been true since any of us have been alive. The difference is the ease in which images can be generated and manipulated now, and the willingness of people to grift.
Re: (Score:2)
Getting in front of the legal and social claims... (Score:2)
The article reads as if Instagram and Social Media by default will get out in front of the claims that AI generated content causes harm or a liability to the social media company.
https://www.theverge.com/news/... [theverge.com]
Law of Demeter is in play (Score:2)
https://www.scry.llc/2025/12/2... [scry.llc]
trust becomes a function of distance
Every week I see the appearance of Law of Demeter (LoD) in different domains. For instance, the recent creation of the "C5" to replace the US-centric "G7". The C5 establishes five global domains of roughly equal standing versus the G7 unipolar world. Trump is not cause, he is effect.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only digital. Double exposure is a thing.
I've Got Some Bad News for You, Sunshine (Score:5, Insightful)
Mosseri wrote that for most of his life he could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened...
That's always been a foolishly naive stance to take. Going all the way back to the early days of photography, images were routinely staged or faked. For example, the American civil war photographer Mathew Brady would arrive days after a battlefield had been cleared of casualties, so he would have his assistants lie on the ground to provide the appearance actual dead.
Technology has made fakes easier to produce, but they've always been with us. What's in shorter supply today is critical thinking. Always question media, never take it at face value. Ask yourself, what is this piece of media trying to lead me to believe? What agenda does it serve? Who is behind it?
And finally, get off Facebook and Instagram. They are two of the larger purveyors of fraudulent media on the internet.
Re:I've Got Some Bad News for You, Sunshine (Score:5, Insightful)
But he still had to go there, had to bring a lot of people, had to get everyone to keep quiet about how they did it, etc.
In the time it's taken me to write this someone could write a prompt to create an entire video of a nuke hitting New York and sharing it all over the internet for everyone to immediately see, and in the time it took you to read it he could prompt another video for Los Angeles. There's a very massive difference in scope.
Re: (Score:2)
hehe, you just triggered that scene from Austin Powers where Dr. Evil shows the White House getting blasted by the space ship, the clip from Independence Day.
Re: (Score:3)
You're missing the point. While the capability has always been there (I still have in my collection a book describing how to create fake images dated from 1930s with a scuba diver climbing out of a road puddle on the front cover) the reality is that while something was possible back then it required *skill*. That has completely been eliminated. There's no skill required at all anymore, just a text prompt.
Back in the day even though fakery was possible you could reasonably assume that what you saw was likely
Mod parent up (Score:2)
This is it in a nutshell- these days any drooling idiot can create convincing fake images and videos.
No need for the slightest bit of skill or knowledge or technical acumen- just speak into a mic or type into a form field, and you have the content.
For a long time this simply wasn't practical for the average person, and for the most part most photos weren't routinely faked. For decades it made sense to trust by default that images were more or less legit.
Yep, those days are gone. Same thing with text as I've
Re: (Score:2)
...and perhaps more critically - money.
Actually, not at all. There was virtually no investment of significance required for editing and faking photos in a darkroom compared to the normal development process. What was required was time and imagination.
And even 10 years ago you could do wonders with free photo editors. That still required skill without any additional capital layout.
to be pedantic (Score:2)
"...most of his life he could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened, adding that this is clearly no longer the case."
No, it is and always will be the case that photographs are "largely accurate captures of moments that happened", in fact completely accurate. That's what a photograph is. Not all images are photographs, the "head" of Instagram should know this.
Re: (Score:2)
it is and always will be the case that photographs are "largely accurate captures of moments that happened", in fact completely accurate. That's what a photograph is.
No. That's what a singly exposed photo negative shot through the most ideal lens possible with the best possible film in good lighting is, or as close as you can get anyway. A photograph as presented to you might be any number of things and it is extremely typical to for example dodge and burn specific regions of a photograph to emphasize or hide specific details. When I took a B&W photo class quite some moons ago, one of my most appreciated photos was of a sign. It was too dark so contrast was poor, an
Re: (Score:2)
June 1994, the identical mugshot photo of OJ Simpson... two very different magazine covers achieved with just dodge and burn:
https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com... [brightspotcdn.com]
Instagram face (Score:2)
For years, there was a concept of "instagram face". That specific set of filters that so many women chose to use that made them all look very similar.
So you couldn't trust photographs on instagram for a very long time now. This is nothing new.
Re: (Score:2)
"A women" is a giveaway that the only sex you get is when you pay wor it.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with you this is not new, I will even add Instagram never published photographs. We still can have some trust in photographs, when in the form of RAW files from a camera capable of cryptographic signatures such as the C2PA standard (Content Credentials). Of course a well-funded actor such as a State agency could hack it, but that was already the case with film photography.
Return to "normal" (Score:5, Interesting)
Its interesting to think about what an anomaly the last hundred or so years has been. Prior to easy photography and radio/telegraph virtually all information would have been secondhand and easily manipulated or misconstrued. At the founding of the US there would have been many printers in any major city, each with agendas. There were prominent "debates" held through these publications that were done by pseudonym and were often false or salacious. Realistically thats part of what lit the fire of the American revolutionary war. When you think about it, it all looks a whole lot like the modern partisan media landscape with all its manipulations.
I dont know how this all unfolds, and its entirely possible modern technology amplifies the bad aspects of this way more than in the past (its a lot easier to be fooled by a realistic image than a political cartoon, for example). But i do take a little comfort in the fact that we've been here before.
Photoshopped (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
It wasn't just photoshop though. Real photos/videos with a false legend have been a thing on social media. Like picture of riots that were actually from years ago in another country.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
At documented as early as 1917, there's the Cottingley Fairies hoax photos, which even fooled Arthur Conan Doyle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
Impact on the justice system (Score:2)
I wonder how this is would impact the justice system. Courts very much rely on photos and videos as the source of truth.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Impact on the justice system (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure that desperate people would use desperate measures, regardless of the consequences. After all, if you're going to prison, fabricating evidence sounds like an acceptable risk. You'd probably only get like another year on top of your original sentence. The lawyers would probably get away with claiming plausible deniability and shifting the blame to the client.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you can't just trust a digital image. You never could "just trust" an analog image either. Nor can you trust eye witness, even if they they'll do their best to tell the truth. Simply believing a single impression without any further evcidence never was a good idea.
Digital signing cameras (Score:2)
I tossed this out on /. like over a decade (or two) ago. I think the responses I got were either that it's impractical somehow or that it already existed. It's too far back to find, but would it be possible to create a camera with a private key in silicon that signs every image it creates. Any attempt to read out the key from the silicon would destroy it.
The image can only be read with a public key for that specific camera, and the encryption would be embedded in the image (watermark) in such a way that
Vision and hearing are out (Score:2)
You can trust your eyes, but not photographs (Score:4, Interesting)
You can trust your eyes to tell you what's real. That's not the problem. The issue is that a photograph of something isn't that something. What your eyes tell you about the photograph itself can be trusted, but that doesn't tell you anything about whether you can trust the image represented in the photograph or whether what the camera captured was edited before it was shown to you. And even when you're looking directly at something, there's a difference between what you're seeing and how your brain interprets what you're seeing (see any number of optical illusions that mess with how you interpret what you see, eg. forced perspective).
If you keep this in mind, you have a guide for working out how much you can trust any way you get information.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Or seen a professional pickpocket? I've seen YouTube videos in which I needed to rewind 5 times before I saw the moment when the pickpocket got the item from his victim, which suddenly had in his hands.
Re: (Score:2)
At a magic show, everything you saw was real. I mean, it had to be, it actually happened. But what you thought you saw happen isn't what you actually saw, it's how your brain interpreted what you saw. Eg., you saw the magician slide the cup far enough off the back of the table so the ball under it dropped out into the basket hidden back there, but you didn't notice because it happened so fast and he'd directed your attention somewhere else. But the guy who works eye-in-the-sky for a casino, he noticed becau
Re: (Score:2)
You started off poorly but ended excellently. No. You can NOT trust your eyes to tell you what is real. Lighting and shading tricks work against you constantly. What you thought you saw, you didn't actually see. Even your eyes lie to you. Do you see your nose constantly? Didn't think so... and yet, now that you know to look for it, you will see it... until you forget about it again.
Headline correction in view of headline (Score:1)
The problem is we don't teach critical thinking (Score:2)
So yeah, you can tell that that picture of Donald Trump giving Bill Clinton a blow job isn't real and you know that vaccines work, but your uncle doesn't. (Although he has now come up with reasons why giving a dude a blowjob is a power move in some contexts)
Critical thinking can be taught but it needs to be taught through the humanities not the sciences or math because you need a subject that has
Re: The problem is we don't teach critical thinkin (Score:1)
So yeah, you can tell that that picture of Donald Trump giving Bill Clinton a blow job
Nobody needed to know what your favorite kind of deepfake porn is. Just sayin.
Remember, the riches still telling their kids to go to college. It's only your kids that are going to be plumbers
Who is "the riches"? And why are you hating on plumbers? If only you had enough money to hire one, you wouldn't be living in your own filth right now. Or are you just hating on them because anyone making over $100,000 per annum as many plumbers do is "the riches" to you?
What possible solutions are being pursued? (Score:2)
Can people enlighten me/us about the solutions you're aware of that
Re: (Score:2)
The one's I've heard being pushed are things like "watermarks", which don't do the casual observer any good.
Re: (Score:1)
I'll be curious to see what can be done for audio. The 'voiceprints' that banks use can't really suffice on their own.
Plausable deniability (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think "honey" will evaluate it in the same way.... people do still put 2 and 2 together to get 4. Just because there is "plausible deniability" doesn't mean it passes the smell test. People aren't stupid. Well, some are but not all, especially when it concerns a subject that is important to them.
Digital signatures and chain of trust for content (Score:2)
Camera makers are pushing for Content Authenticity. Look for CAI and C2PA standards. Canon are Nikon are both on board, also some phone makers, including Samsung, see https://news.samsung.com/globa... [samsung.com]
Idea is that the device captures the image and signs it with vendor's certificate. Then, when you edit it in your editor (Photoshop - unfortunately GIMP not yet), the editor saves in the metadata what exactly you changed and signs with their own cert (e.g. "I cropped this photo and adjusted lighting curves a bi
Re: (Score:2)
I am sure that will benefit the users, just like the other trusted computing techniques.
As you already mention with GIMP, it already starts that using a self compiled image editor breaks the trust chain. Even with a signed GIMP binary, you can assume that some verifiers will only allow signatures from a narrow range of "trusted" programs. Your image was edited with GIMP instead of Photoshop? We didn't audit GIMP, so we cannot trust your image.
Nope. Trusted computing only benefits the people pushing these th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is a way to create a false negative (correct photo but no watermark), but adding a signed watermark is not that simple. I think there were first proof of concepts of people manipulating cameras to sign an injected image, though.
I do not fully remember how, I think they used some feature to edit stuff on the camera, which should not have signed the image afterward but did it? You could also do it the almost analog way and manipulate the sensor. Or the fully analog way and get the optics right that the i
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I heard about that. The idea is not bad, but why would I trust a vendor certificate more than the creator's? Assume I am taking an image of something spectacular or obnoxious happening. So I timestamp and sign the image, then pass it on. Who ever has doubts about it might ask me. I were a reported or press photographer I'll stand with my rep for it. The "anonymous whistleblower" argument doesn't work here. If "they" want to know your identity they'll find out from the camera ID that is in the EXIF data
The Nature of Memory (Score:2)
Guy Gavriel Kay (who was hired at a very young age by Christopher Tolkien to complete The Silmarillion) frequently writes on the theme of memory. His most famous novel is probably Tigana, which is literally (avoiding spoilers) about the unreliable nature of memory. Kay wrote in an afterword:
There exists a photo – I think I saw it first in ‘LIFE’ magazine – from Czechosloviakia, in 1968, the time of the ‘Prague Spring’ when a brief, euphoric flicker of freedom animated that Iron Curtain country before the Soviet tanks rolled in and crushed it brutally.
There are actually two photographs. The first shows a number of Communist Party functionaries in a room, wearing nondescript suits, looking properly sombre. The second is the same photo. Almost. There is one functionary missing now, and something I recall to be a large plant inserted where he was. The missing figure – part of the crushed uprising – is not only dead, he has been erased from the record. A trivial technical accomplishment today, when the capacity we have for altering images and sound is so extreme, but back then the two photographs registered powerfully for me, and lingered for twenty years: not only killed, but made to never have been. Source [brightweavings.com]
Photographic manipulation, and propaganda, and the manipulation of people and their memories, has been going on for a long time! The difference now, as others have said, is the ubiquity, capacity, low technological barri
You Can't Trust Your Eyes (Score:1)
You can't trustyour eyes anymore but you can trust some stranger on the internet telling you that you can't trust yourself. Sounds plausible. In bizzarroworld. Where we are living.
hmm (Score:1)
Interesting point coming from a person who (Score:2)
has a "photo sharing" social media platform where when you click the + button it literally asks you if you want to upload a picture, take a picture, or simply generate something fake.
Fuck this man, he's the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
He's only a small part of the problem. A very small part.
Yes, he benefits from the problem, but he didn't create it. It's been increasingly obvious and significant year by year for decades. The only solutions I've seen are "chain of provenance" solutions, and those are only practical for extremely limited uses. Remember the movies about things like giant squids tearing down the Golden Gate bridge, or giant tarantulas roaming around the country? Those are parts of the problem. And unless you want to ge
I can trust my eyes, but not the medium. (Score:2)
Trust must be earned, and people don't seem bother with that when they are on the internet.