Originally written in November 2024

Your iPhone doesn't take photographs, at least not in the sense it used to mean. The photos are heavily processed, and thus, depict not reality, but a reality modified by AI.

A photo of a far away building contains details that were purely imagined by the AI. A photo of a moving bus has, for the sake of sharpness, garbled its line number.

You used to be able to point at the matrix dot display not being fully refreshed to explain the garble. No more, it is unknowable as of late. Was it the display? Was it the "computational photography"?

You do not know, and even if you did. You can't turn it off. All devices now have this extra layer over reality.

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You watch a show where they present photographic evidence in a court case. You chuckle - how ridiculous. A classic tell tale sign of a show made before the advent of generative AI. Everybody knows that any image can be generated by anyone in seconds.

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And thus disappears our way of capturing reality, of freezing a point in time. And with it disappears reality itself. Aside from the morning commute, that stays real. Too real, and so you decide to whip out your phone.