The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority escalated its investigation of the Getty Images-Shutterstock merger to Phase 2 on November 3, 2025, citing concerns about “substantial lessening of competition” and potential for “higher prices” and “lower quality” content for news publishers. Three weeks later, Getty CEO Craig Peters told the FinancialContinue Reading
The End of Visual Evidence It’s a few years from now. A photo surfaces of something that matters: a protest, an accident, a natural disaster. You watch it. You feel something. You assume it’s fake. You scroll past. The photograph might be real. Someone might have captured a genuine momentContinue Reading
The industry finally stopped theorizing and started building the infrastructure to preserve truth itself We’ve reached the inflection point. Not the one we’ll read about in retrospect, but the one happening right now—where the exponential flood of AI-generated content threatens to drown out any meaningful signal of authenticity. The WorldContinue Reading
As generative AI continues to infiltrate everything from smartphone cameras to image editors, one deceptively simple question remains unresolved and increasingly urgent: How much AI involvement is enough to call something AI-generated? It is not just a technical question or a legalContinue Reading
Perception, like clouds, is shaped more by the observer than the object. One person sees a horse galloping through the sky; another sees a face, a dragon, or nothing at all. The sky doesn’t change—the viewer does. And so it is with images. We do not see the world asContinue Reading
Copyright is a Pillar of Provenance Copyright isn’t just a legal mechanism—it’s also a system of traceability. When a piece of content is protected by copyright: Its origin is clear (who created it, when, and under what rights). Its chain of custody can often be reconstructed (via licenses, credits, metadata,Continue Reading
What if every photograph that could ever be taken already exists? Not in the sense that someone has already captured them, but in the sense that they are all possible, waiting to be revealed. How AI Generates Images: Deconstructing and Reassembling Reality Generative AI doesn’t “copy” images from its trainingContinue Reading
They like the tool, but they don’t like the perceived demonization: After Instagram instituted a label on images to clearly identify those that were AI-generated, many photographers stood up in arms, angry that it also included images retouched using AI. “It is not the same,” they say. “Retouching,” they say,Continue Reading
As we progress in our new decade, an invisible crisis is unfolding. In our digital age, where images can be manipulated effortlessly or generated entirely by artificial intelligence, our faith in what we see is crumbling. Since we rely on our senses to make decisions about the world—particularly our senseContinue Reading
In the world of photography, the magic often happens in the blink of an eye. A photographer must capture a moment that is gone almost as soon as it arrives. This ability to seize the ephemeral is not just luck—it is the mastery of probability, honed through years of experienceContinue Reading