I Am Not Your Wall Expert

I decline the appointment. I am not qualified to say how a churchyard wall ought to land on a car.

I realize this leaves a vacancy on the internet. Perhaps someone who has watched a churchyard wall land on a car could fill it. Failing that, I suggest we leave the position open. There are worse things than an empty chair. I have occupied several of them.

In Whitby, after Storm Boelo, a publican named Sue Taylor photographed rocks from a collapsed wall resting on the bonnets of parked cars. She put two pictures on Facebook. According to Seb Cheer’s October 27 report for the BBC, dozens of comments said the pictures had been made or changed with AI. Taylor said she hadn’t edited them.

The rocks looked rather neatly arranged. Professor Theocharis Kyriacou, an AI expert at York St John University, understood why that might seem surprising. Then he supplied a question which considerably reduced the available workforce: how many of us had ever witnessed this particular kind of collapse?

Well. There goes my application.

I have seen walls. Hundreds of the bastards. Standing there, largely getting on with it. This has given me a strong visual education in walls which have not fallen down. I am less certain what happens during the part which makes the news.

It is a magnificent promotion, though. Yesterday I didn’t know what a fallen wall should look like. Today I have heard of an image generator, and the same ignorance entitles me to declare that a photograph is wrong. No apprenticeship. No need to learn about the stones, the slope, the cars, or the wall. Familiarity with the existence of a machine has apparently qualified me to inspect everything the machine might imitate.

I am not claiming that every person who doubted Taylor’s pictures followed this reasoning. The BBC doesn’t establish their individual reasons. I recognize the proposed job because I can feel how easily I could do it. Something looks wrong. There is now a name for the wrongness. I can type the name before I have found out what I am looking at.

And I do enjoy finding a mistake. Particularly one which takes less time to identify than it would take to understand the subject. A little crooked lettering, a finger somewhere it shouldn’t be, and I get to walk out of the picture feeling more intelligent than when I entered it.

Sometimes the mistake is there. A picture really has been manufactured. The pleasure isn’t proof that the finding is false, any more than the pleasure of finding a banknote makes the banknote counterfeit. I would happily keep both.

But the neat rocks present a less agreeable examination. I cannot point to a sixth finger. I have to know something about rocks arriving on cars. I can either acquire some knowledge, find somebody who has it, or quietly substitute my expectations. The last option has the advantage of being immediately available.

Here is the thing about my expectations: I can supply them on absolutely any subject. Ask me what a spacecraft should look like when it breaks up. Ask me how a crowd moves when frightened. Ask me what expression a man ought to have after the worst news of his life. I have pictures in my head for all of it. A remarkable service from someone who can lose a pen without changing chairs.

The pictures aren’t worthless. They just aren’t qualifications.

Cheer reports that the BBC checked independently posted photographs and videos of the damage and spoke to eyewitnesses who corroborated Taylor’s images. That is the reporting I am relying on, not an examination of the original files which I have conducted myself. It is also an answer. I don’t need the people in Whitby to keep passing examinations because I have become interested in the possibility of cheating.

I can accept the answer without acquiring a private understanding of the collapse. This seems an excellent bargain. Somebody did the checking, and I get to learn that something happened which I wouldn’t have known how to arrange.

That last part is worth keeping.

I don’t want the world restricted to incidents I could have art-directed. I have a limited budget and a tendency to repeat myself. Give me responsibility for the weather and by Thursday there will be complaints about the dialogue. The people will all be expressing surprise in the same three ways. Somebody will have to ask me whether the rain could fall somewhere other than a window.

I can be a man looking at an unfamiliar thing.

There ought to be plenty of work for such a man. I know almost nothing about most of the things in a photograph.

And I would like to preserve my inexperience of a few of them. I have never watched a churchyard wall come down on a car. I have never watched the sea from underneath a sinking boat, either.

Please don’t put me through the practical just to improve my eye.

Source: These Storm Boelo images were not AI - but some people thought they were