As an academic who has spent the past 25 years developing techniques to detect photo manipulation, I am used to getting panicked calls from reporters trying to authenticate a breaking story.
This time, the calls, emails, and texts started rolling in on Sunday evening. Catherine, Princess of Wales, has not been seen publicly since Christmas Day. The abdominal surgery she underwent in January led to widespread speculation as to her whereabouts and wellbeing.
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Sunday was Mother’s Day in the U.K., and Kensington Palace had
But just hours later, the AP
The primary concern appeared to be over Princess Charlotte’s left sleeve, which showed clear signs of digital manipulation. What was unclear at the time was whether this obvious artifact was a sign of more significant photo editing, or an isolated example of minor photo editing.
In an effort to find out, I started by analyzing the image with a forensic software designed to distinguish photographic images from fully AI-generated images. This analysis confidently classified the image as not AI-generated.
I then performed a few more traditional forensic tests including analyzing the lighting and sensor noise pattern. None of these tests revealed evidence of more significant manipulation.
After all this, I concluded it was most likely that the photo was edited using Photoshop or a camera’s onboard editing tools. While I can’t be 100% certain of it, this explanation is consistent with Princess Kate’s
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In a rational world, this would be the end of the story. But the world—and social media in particular—is nothing if not irrational. I am already receiving dozens of emails with “evidence” of more nefarious photo manipulation and AI-generation which are then being used to speculate wildly about Princess Kate’s health. And while the type of post-hoc forensic analyses that I perform can help photo editors and journalists sort out stories like this, they cannot necessarily help combat rumors and conspiracies that quickly spread online.
Manipulated images are nothing new, even from official sources. The Associated Press, for example, suspended the agency’s distribution of official imagery from the Pentagon for a time in 2008 after it released a
The problem, of course, is that modern technologies make the alteration of images and video easy. And while often done for creative purposes, alteration can be problematic when it comes to images of real events, undermining trust in journalism.
Detection software can be useful on an ad-hoc basis, highlighting problematic areas of an image, or whether an image may have been AI-generated. But it has limitations, being neither scalable nor consistently accurate—and bad actors will always be one step ahead of the latest detection software.
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So, what to do?
The answer likely lies in digital provenance—understanding the origins of digital files, be they images, video, audio, or anything else. Provenance covers not only how the files were created, but also whether, and how, they were manipulated during their journey from creation to publication.
The Content Authenticity Initiative
That open standard was developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (
C2PA developed
The credentialing protocols are being incorporated into hardware devices—cameras and smartphones—specifically so that the future viewer can accurately determine the date, time, and location of a photo at the point of capture. The same technology is already part of Photoshop and other editing programs, allowing edit changes to a file to be logged and inspected.
All that information pops up when the viewer clicks on the “cr” icon, and in the same clear format and plain language as a nutrition label on the side of a box of cereal.
Were this technology fully in use today, news photo editors could have reviewed the Content Credentials of the Royal Family’s photo before publication and avoided the panic of retraction.
That’s why the Content Authenticity Initiative is working towards global adoption of Content Credentials, and why media companies like the BBC are already gradually introducing these labels. Others, like the AP and AFP, are working to do so later this year.
Universal adoption of this standard means that, over time, every piece of digital content can eventually carry Content Credentials, creating a shared understanding of what to trust and why. Proving what’s real—as opposed to detecting what’s false—replaces doubt with certainty.