Nilay Patel

And over the years, things have gotten even weirder.

There was a mini scandal a few years ago where if you tried to pick a photo of the moon with a Samsung phone, the phone actually just generated a picture of the moon.

Super weird.

And of course, Google Pixel phones have all kinds of Gemini-powered AI tools in them, to the point where Google now says the camera is there to help people capture memories, not moments in time.

This is all a lot, and like I said, we've been talking about it for years here at The Verge.

I bring this all up because generative AI is taking the what is a photo debate to its absolute limits.

It's hard to even agree on how much AI editing makes something an AI-edited photo, or whether any of these features should be considered AI in the first place.

And if that's so hard, how can we possibly reach consensus on what's real and what we label as real?

Cameramakers have all mostly given up here.

And now I think we're starting to see the major social media platforms do the same thing.

I wanted to talk about this for a second here because obviously it's an obsession of mine.

But also I think laying it all out makes it obvious how very, very complicated it is.

Which brings us back to Adam Aseri, Instagram, and the debate over AI labeling.

I will give some credit to Instagram and Adam Aseri here in that they are at least trying and thinking about it and publicly thinking about it in a way that none of the other social networks seem to have given any shred of consideration to.

TikTok, for example, is nowhere to be found here.

They are just going to distribute whatever they distribute without any of these labels and it doesn't seem like they're part of the standard.

X.com.

I think X is absolutely just fully down the rabbit hole of distributing pure AI misinformation.

YouTube seems like the outlier, right?

Google runs SynthID.