On Sunday, Kensington Palace released a photo of Kate, Princess of Wales. The image, which was also shared to the royal couple's Instagram account, shows Middleton sitting smiling surrounded by her three children. The photo, said to have been taken by her husband Prince William in Windsor, was widely distributed by news agencies including the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters and Getty Images. Hours later, the same agency withdrew the image and warned clients not to use it under any circumstances.
“Upon closer inspection, it appears that the source manipulated this image,” the Associated Press wrote in a so-called kill notice. Citing “editorial issues”, AFP news agency said the photo “cannot be used in any way in the future”.News outlets that published this photo include: new york times and washington postthen took it down.
As of Sunday night in the US, Prince William and Duchess Kate's Instagram posts remained. “Thank you for your kind wishes and continued support over the past two months,” the caption reads. “Happy Mother's Day to everyone.'' (Mother's Day is March 10th in the UK.)
Observers have pointed out a number of seeming inconsistencies with the image, most notably around Princess Charlotte's hands. The pattern on her skirt overlaps where the sweater should be. An AP spokesperson referred WIRED to the following portion of the outlet's own article on the incident: This photo shows an inconsistency in the placement of Princess Charlotte's left hand. ”
AP guidelines allow for “tweaks to photos” such as cropping, converting to grayscale, and other tweaks as long as they do not materially deviate from the original scene. Otherwise it's very strict. Photographers can't even remove red eye from their subjects.
If anything, the photo appears to have been aimed at combating a conspiracy that has spread around Middleton's prolonged absence from public view following abdominal surgery on January 16th. The obvious manipulation of the photo had the opposite effect.
Mr Middleton was reportedly discharged from the London Clinic, a private hospital, on January 29 after a 13-day recovery period. Since then, her only public appearance was reportedly in a car driving near Windsor Castle. Grainy paparazzi photos recorded the event.
The absence sparked a number of conspiracy theories, mostly focused on the severity of Middleton's illness. The controversy over Sunday's photo sparked new speculation. This is a completely predictable outcome of an unexplained error in judgment. Why release such clearly altered images when the stakes are so high and the scrutiny so intense? Kensington Palace did not respond to a request for comment.
The incident also comes at a time when the media and public are on high alert about artificial intelligence and its ability to create realistic images, and increasingly audio and video, from simple prompts. .
Concerns about AI manipulation are well-founded, but Middleton's photo serves as a useful reminder that photo manipulation doesn't require much sophistication. If anything, this looks like a failure of Photoshop's job and a more traditional form of image adjustment. Photoshop itself employs his AI tools, but this doesn't seem to be a completely invented image that will keep engineers up at night.
It's still unclear exactly what happened here. However, if this was a bad Photoshop job, the most important point may be that most digital manipulations don't leave many obvious traces.