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.