The pursuit of perfect reproduction of the real world has driven the fields of photography and cinematography since the inception of photography itself. When modern people look back on very early photographs from the 19th century, they usually remark on how “blurry” and impressionistic they are, more like a painting than what we know as a photograph.
The earliest photographic processes like the daguerreotype were fussy and labor-intensive; if you wanted a good image you needed a lot of skill and patience. Light-sensitive emulsions in those days were very “slow,” meaning they needed to have a lot of light thrown on them to form an image. Early photographic portrait studios had devices to hold the sitter’s head still for the long exposures, seconds to minutes, necessary to get a likeness that wasn’t blurry.
Monochrome photography came first, of course, but from the start enthusiasts were looking for a way to reproduce natural color photographs. This took a long time. Some of the early processes like autochrome used dyed granules of potato starch mixed into the light-sensitive emulsion along with silver halide. In this way, full-color photographs could be achieved, even if they weren’t as detailed as what we’re used to today.
In 2025, we’ve come full circle while at the same time we’ve jumped right out of the frame. Phones with built-in cameras are ubiquitous, and even though many of the videos we see with them are as grainy as old chemical photographs, we still see the videos as being “realistic.” But when there’s that much room to maneuver, it’s easy to see how AI could upset the apple cart even further.
Take the latest “thing” going around on social media. There’s a video depicting world leaders—French President Emmaneul Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Brit Prime Minister Keir Starmer—meeting around a table. Users are claiming they can see the men trying to hide a bag of cocaine and associated implements when they realize they’re being filmed.
This account shows the original video:
Sure, it does look like Macron and Merz are scurrying to hide something beneath their hands, but would we read those actions into this video if we weren’t first prompted with the idea that it was drug-hiding behavior? And if that is what’s shown, can we know that it happened in the real world, or might it be an AI edit of reality?
X/Twitter users had fun using AI to add obviously false elements, like sticking in an image of comedian Dave Chappelle performing as one his most famous sketch characters, a cocaine addict. Look sharp-Hunter Biden is in there too!
This one purports to show Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy sniffing his nose suspiciously, but who can say if it’s even real.
If you polled the bulk of people responding to the post, they’d say it’s all a misunderstanding. Lots of users pointed out that what others were claiming was a spoon for measuring cocaine was really just a swizzle stick for a cocktail next to a tissue.
