No one should trust the camera in the age of AI

This war is being fought with pictures more than words. The poignant shots, often selfies, of families, children, even babies, who were to become victims of Hamas butchery, the wailing mothers and children on stretchers in Gaza, the missile strikes and collapsed concrete buildings. We know politicians on all sides lie, but photography is a mechanical process; these pictures must, surely, be the truth?

Almost all these photos have been taken with mobile phones. To a rough approximation, everybody now has a smartphone. There are said to be seven billion smartphones in use around the world – there are only eight billion people. (Sales of what we used to know as cameras have crashed by 85 per cent.)

On these devices, it is said, 93 million selfies are taken daily. People don’t, on the whole, manipulate smartphone shots, but they do post them online as faint slivers of their own truth in an otherwise manipulated world. ‘These are me,’ say the photos, even if the person has already been riddled with bullets.

Some smartphone pictures are grisly images of the aftermath of violence. These are ways of circumventing the reluctance of the old, familiar media to show the most graphic images of war. Precisely because of their forbidden quality, we feel these must be the truth.

But never such innocence again. I asked Tim Marshall, war-hardened correspondent and distinguished author, about the truth or otherwise of all this. ‘This is not the first conflict in which mobile phone pictures have featured, but it’s the first in which so much horror has been live-streamed or uploaded and seen by so many.’

But after this war is over, the horror, innocence and honesty will be lost. ‘This may also be among the last conflicts in which images, such as those of the brutality on show on 7 October, can be confidently believed.