Nilay Patel

So he's saying, look, we'll start to sign all the images and everything, but actually you need to trust individual creators.

And if you trust the creator, then that will solve the problem.

And it seems like...

you're really skipping over the part where creators are often fooled by AI generated content, like all the time.

And I don't mean that to say like creators as a class of people, I mean literally just everyone is fooled by AI content all the time.

And so if you're trusting people to understand it and then share what they think is real, and then you're trusting the consumers to trust the people, that also seems like a whirlwind of chaos.

On top of that, and you've written about this as well, there's the notion that these labels make you mad at people, right?

So that if you label a piece of content as AI generated, the creator gets furious because it makes their work seem less important or less valuable.

The audiences yell at the creators.

And so there's been a real push to get rid of these labels entirely.

because they seem to make everyone mad.

How does that dynamic work here?

Does any of this have a way through?

Let's pause here for a second, because I want to lay out some important context before we go any farther.

If you're a Verge reader or even listening to the Verge cast, you know that we've been asking a very simple question for over five years now.

What is a photo?

It sounds simple, but it's actually quite complicated.

Because after all, when you push the shutter button on a modern smartphone, you are not actually capturing a single moment in time, which is what most people think of a photo as.

Modern phones actually take a lot of frames, both before and after the second you push the shutter button, and then merge them into a single final photo.

That's to do things like even out the shadows and highlights of a photo, to capture more texture, to accomplish things like night mode.