The trial involving Getty Images and Stability AI began in London this week, and the AI company has claimed in its opening statement that the copyright case represents an “overt threat” to the entire industry. Getty rejects that motion arguing in court yesterday that it “is not a battle between creatives and technology, where a win for Getty Images means the end of AI.”
Shortly after World Press Photo suspended Nick Ut’s credit for the famous photo, The Terror of War, also known as Napalm Girl, three former Chairs and jurors of the World Press Photo Contest wrote an open letter to World Press Photo, expressing their dismay at the organization’s decision. Now, 400 professional photographers have signed onto that letter.
A week after World Press Photo suspended Nick Ut’s credit on the famous Napalm Girl photo, big names in photojournalism have come to Ut’s defense and attacked The Stringer and the people behind it for a perceived lack of transparency.
As former Chairs and jurors of the World Press Photo Contest, we are saddened and deeply troubled by your decision to remove the attribution of Nick Ut as the photographer who took the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year known as “The Terror of War.”
Earlier this month, the Associated Press announced that it found “no definitive evidence” to warrant changing the photo’s authorship, and released a 96-page report on the matter – its second in four months – based on its own internal investigation. The AP concluded that it was “possible” Ut took the photo, and found no evidence that Nguyen took it instead. The matter was unable to be proven conclusively, it added, due to the passage of time, the absence of key evidence, the limitations of technology and the deaths of several key people involved.
Mahadevan described the replacement of professional journalists and fact-checkers with the general public as a monumental failure. “The future of facts online is you,” he told the audience. “In an incredibly hostile online world, all of these platforms have basically said, ‘You’re on your own. It’s up to you.’”
Georgian journalists argued that Mikhail Tereshchenko, a staffer for a Russian state-backed media outlet, should not have received the award for his photos of the Tbilisi protests.
Georgian journalists argued that Mikhail Tereshchenko, a staffer for a Russian state-backed media outlet, should not have received the award for his photos of the Tbilisi protests.
Right about 10 years ago, I wrote an article that went viral and sparked a lot of debate. At the time, AI was just starting to show the tip of its beak, and image manipulation was already in full force thanks to a variety of very potent software like Adobe’s Photoshop. The origin of the … Read More →
My conclusion at the time—which also still holds—was that it wasn’t the tools that mattered in judging the authoritative and authentic quality of a photojournalistic image, it was the intent. The photographer’s intent.
World Press Photo has disinvited a Russian photographer from the awards ceremony in Amsterdam after the competition awarded him a prize in its 2025 competition.
World Press Photo apologized for its controversial decision to present two award-winning images captured by two different photographers as a thematic pair. One of the images showed a six-year-old Ukrainian child suffering from panic attacks following Russian artillery shelling, while the other showed a wounded pro-Russian militant.
However, OstLicht now says the auction was manipulated, prompting the long-time Austrian company to sever its relationship with its Chinese auction partner, Lidong Auction Ltd. In a statement on its website, OstLicht claims that Lidong Ltd. manipulated the auction bidding and results. The complete statement from OstLicht founder Peter Coeln is available below:
Carl De Keyzer made his name by capturing very real photographs from the Soviet Union, India, and the Belgian Congo. However, for his most recent project, De Keyzer swapped the camera for artificial intelligence imaging tools.
“More than 50 years later, I cannot understand why Mr. Carl Robinson, a fellow employee of the AP in Saigon at the time, would make up a story and claim I did not take that iconic photo, The Terror or War aka Napalm Girl,” he writes.
if photography is to survive, the community will need to institute rigorous measures to help certify what is real photograph from what is generated images
Below are the three broad approaches—technological, behavioral, and legislative—that can create an infrastructure supporting photography as a reliable witness. Each is described in more depth, highlighting specific tools and standards that could tangibly bolster trust in light-based imagery.
If you have had a visual currency that has been both believable and useful in making the lives of millions of people better, in helping to bring wars to an end earlier, in promoting civil rights, and in provoking global interventions when there’s disease or famine or earthquakes or other serious issues, rather than saying just that it’s been diminished in terms of its credibility, which it has been, I think the appropriate question is: What can be done to restore trust in it as a witness?
When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stymied his travel plans, photographer Carl De Keyzer decided to take a virtual trip instead, creating a series of AI-generated images. He was unprepared for the consequences.
From his home, the lauded documentary photographer began to work on a collection of images about Russia with the help of generative artificial intelligence (AI). He was unprepared for the consequences.
Alleged editorial chats published by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein suggest the paper tried to limit the publication of photos of the accused shooter.
“We’ve had Mangione leading the site overnight (and the pic is very strong), but as more details have emerged, his profile matches one of a mass shooter more closely than anything else (mental health questions, shocking crime, manifesto, etc. etc.),” the photo editor said in the messages. “The news value and public service of showing his face are diminishing, compared with concerns of amplifying the crime and inspiring others — something we avoid with mass shooters in particular.”
As a research physicist from MIT, Stuart Sevier learned a lot about reality, technology, and perhaps most importantly, the perception of reality. He veered off his hardcore academic track to pursue the concept of reality from a more engineering-based perspective, ultimately founding Atom Images and working with a talented team to build the Atom H1, a tool built for photographers to capture trusted, authentic images in a world where the line between real and fake is becoming blurrier by the day.
The response to the podcast was immediate — so fast that it isn’t even possible that a majority of those who left comments and hit the dislike button could have listened to the whole podcast. Simply for setting foot in Adobe’s building, we were called shills as the hate flowed in. It feels very much like a “shoot the messenger” situation — one I’ve been in before, but that doesn’t make it any easier to come to terms with.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve compiled the questions you want Adobe to answer related to its push into AI, recent controversies, and the state of photography in general. We had a chance to sit down with Maria Yap, Adobe’s Vice President of Digital Imaging, to give the company a chance to respond.
