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
AI Everywhere, But Not All the Time Every October in San Francisco, where robot taxis are busily roaming the streets, something peculiar happens. The photography industry’s old guard—print manufacturers, stock agencies, software makers—sits down with its new blood: the brilliant engineers building AI-powered photo services, mobile apps, editing tools, andContinue Reading
So, What Do We Mean by “Authentic”? The word has been bounced around a lot lately. Understandably. But under different keyboards, it means entirely different things. We’re using one word for two very different ideas. The “Authentic” Feeling Who talks about authenticity? Marketers. They are painfully obsessed with connecting withContinue Reading
As the internet evolves into an AI agent repository database, filled with text, images, videos, and sounds specifically built to be used and consumed by AI systems, we can envision a segregated internet area solely reserved for real human beings, where access is predicated on proving one’s humanity through increasinglyContinue 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
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
The European Union’s Copyright Directive, specifically its contentious Article 17, was supposed to revolutionize the relationship between online platforms and rights holders. It was going to close the value gap and make social media platforms finally take down or pay for all the copyrighted content they were up to now,Continue Reading
In photography, there are two primary types of biases: the subjects we choose to capture and the images we ultimately decide to share. These two biases, while often intertwined, come from different motivations. The first—the choice of subject—is driven by a sense of ownership, the feeling that this moment, scene,Continue Reading
On January 14, 2014, photographer Narciso Contreras was dismissed by AP for editing a war photo, raising issues of journalistic integrity and trust. Recent advancements like the Content Credentials metadata framework aim to restore authenticity in images, flagging edits and AI involvement. Major tech companies, camera manufacturers, and news agencies are adopting this transparency standard, signaling a paradigm shift in the credibility of visual content.Continue Reading