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The most significant stories about money and politics within the race for the White House
With just a few suggestions, artificial intelligence might need produced a good higher photo. Donald Trump's head must be larger and moved to the middle of the image. No pole impaling the Secret Service agent on the left and distracting from the ex-president's raised arm.
The other extraordinary image from that day's recordings might have been even higher if the grey line captured by Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Mills had been made more spherical.
But then neither photo would have qualified as iconic. The reason Mills and Evan Vucci's original shots are so powerful is precisely because we all know they’re real. There have been countless interviews and reports confirming this.
It is astonishing that folks are still obsessive about authenticity. We are told that the world is moving in the opposite direction and that caveat emptor applies. And yet last Friday the EU declared that the sale of verifications by social media site X violate the principles for online content because users might be “deceived” by malicious actors.
Little blue ticks, for heaven's sake? Or take a look at the furore in March when the Duchess of Cambridge admitted to tampering with a family photo. Despite ubiquitous fakery, we actually care. The alignment of Princess Charlotte's sleeve dominated the news for days.
It's as if we feel that defending the actual is crucial, irrespective of how small or insignificant the violation. Capitalism thrives on trust, and so do democracies. Once you permit changes to a PDF file, so to talk, anything is feasible: economic and financial data can quickly grow to be meaningless, as can election results.
The problem is that latest technologies make it harder to acknowledge the true identity. Generative AI imitates poets. Only Photoluminescence spectroscopy can distinguish lab-grown diamonds from mined ones. Men lust after my Audemars Piguet watch, which is a duplicate.
In theory, demand for originals should fall as the standard of substitutes increases. But the other appears to be the case: higher counterfeits make us revere the unique more. The market value of luxury goods manufacturer LVMH is five times higher than it was just over a decade ago.
Nobody really desires to read sonnets written by AI. And good luck in case your fiancée finds out that the three-carat jewelry in her engagement ring was mass-produced in India. The problem is, though, that it's soon mechanically assumed to be fake.
Unless, in fact, there may be provenance to prove otherwise. Just as nobody doubts the source of those Trump pictures, verification becomes the critical necessity of our times. Welcome to a world of second derivatives – where verifying is less necessary than proving it.
We're already seeing signs of this happening. Think of those “making of” epilogues in nature documentaries. I used to consider them as complacent and spoilers of the magic. Soon we'll be forced to observe the making of the making of, I'd say sneeringly.
But Sir David Attenborough was, as all the time, ahead of his time. Without these behind-the-scenes videos, why would anyone consider anything that happened before? A pod of seals chasing an amazing white shark out to sea? Well, possibly that really happened.
The art industry has long recognized the worth of provenance. Simply saying that a piece is a Cy Twombly has never been enough. Other industries must now quickly improve their verification methods. Not only sellers of natural diamonds, but in addition food and clothing manufacturers, for instance, must do that.
Professional services too. Conflicts of interest look doubly bad when authenticity is valued – hello rating agencies and auditing firms – as does the undeniable fact that there is no such thing as a self-interest. And we won’t blindly trust data and algorithms for for much longer. Black boxes have to be opened.
Financial managers also needs to be aware of this. Provenance-savvy investors have gotten increasingly suspicious of published financial figures. Last 12 months, company-defined adjustments increased the profits of the S&P 500 by almost a 3rd compared to plain accounting figures, in line with Calcbench data. Expect a decline in adjusted earnings.
But it's not only artists and businesses that have to develop strategies to reveal authenticity. We all do. From students writing essays for skeptical teachers to those of us working from home.
Just last month, the US bank Wells Fargo fired greater than a dozen employees because they simulated “keyboard activities” to “create the impression of lively work.” A comic story, yes. But an indication of where we’re heading.
Bosses (and colleagues) never believed in home working – that folks would actually put in the hassle when a TV or fridge beckoned. So monitoring how often a mouse was moved was an obvious response. But home employees have to do more to prove they're not faking it.
Install an always-on camera. Wear a tracker. Musicians can film themselves writing a song, like Taylor Swift does. Unless a novelist releases keystroke metadata similtaneously their latest book, we will assume ChatGPT wrote it.
Such interventions look like Orwell's work. But proving our credibility is the value we’ve got to pay today to keep up legitimacy and trust. Thank God we still value each.
