In a world where the basic job of figuring out what the hell is actually going on anymore exists under what feels like near-constant assault—as technology companies pour billions into cooking up ever-more-elaborate falsehood machines, and politicians see how far they can get by bluntly denying basic facts at the tops of their voices—the job of the journalist has become more important than ever. It remains, essentially, the job of saying, in calm and measured tones, that an event actually did or did not happen—or, y’know, of throwing a picture you’re trying to score some cheap political points with into the lie machine, because the original wasn’t “sharp” enough. Either one works!
This is per Futurism, reporting on the actions of The Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold, who’s been subject to scrutiny this week after asking ChatGPT to “enhance” one of her potshots at recently victorious Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed. Reingold, a former Politico editor who’s been with the Bari Weiss-founded Free Press since 2022—and is, thus, probably pretty used to this level of internet mockery at this point—was in attendance at a Michigan campaign event on Tuesday night, where she posted a photo to Twitter of a woman’s suspiciously shiny accessories, alongside the caption “So far at Abdul El-Sayed’s election night event I’ve spotted, Valentino heels, a Chanel bag, a Moncler jacket, Rolex watches, and a YSL bag among other designer items.” The messaging was, of course, clear: That El-Sayed’s supporters were not “real” Americans, and were, instead, luxury-loving fatcats.
And, indeed, Reingold has now admitted that the picture was not of a real Michigander, on account of her having fed the original photo through ChatGPT. After several outlets noted that Reingold’s photo seemed to include some sloppified details (including Vanity Fair, which pointed out that both the bag and shoes on display seemed to contain details not present in their real designs), Reingold posted a defensive explanation to social media, with a tone suggesting that it’s absolutely no big deal to claim an AI-“enhanced” image is an actual depiction of reality: “Hello my name is Olivia Reingold and I used ChatGPT to brighten and sharpen an image of a woman in Valentino shoes and a Chanel bag, ” she wrote. “After processing, it still shows these same things: a woman wearing Valentino shoes and a Chanel bag. She is a real (and chic!) woman, really wearing those items. The observation holds.”
There are, of course, a lot of ways to edit an image after the fact, including digitally, that don’t involve adding new information to it. Shoving it into The Big Plagiarism Machine and screaming “Enhance!” isn’t one of them, though, and Reingold’s photos make it pretty clear why: The “processing” she is attempting to dismiss as no big deal includes making up new details and shoving them into the image; the resulting hallucinations are deviations from reality—or, as sometimes referred to by those of us in the pedant community, “lies”—pretty much by default.
In the long-term, this is one of those problems that’s probably only going to get worse, as image manipulation technology gets ever-more ubiquitous, and the sheer number of outlets “reporting” on American culture and politics come under less and less top-down scrutiny. In the short-term, though, it’s mostly a reminder that a picture sometimes isn’t worth a thousand words—even if they’re the low-value sort frequently peddled by The Free Press.
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