Photos just aren't what they used to be.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

Remember the old mantra from the early days of social media?

Picks or it didn't happen?

The saying pretty well summed up our approach to separating truth from fiction online.

If you claimed you saw, I don't know, the Pope on your way to work that morning or ate in a Michelin-starred restaurant, well,

you better have the picks to prove it. For more than a century, photographic evidence was about

as close to a physical representation of the real world as we've had. But thanks to new AI-powered

photo editing tools, like the one now available on Google's newest pixel phones,

anyone can create convincing picks of things that didn't happen.

Sarah Zhang is a features editor for The Verge who recently wrote about these cutting-edge tools,

and she says no one's ready for the impact of this technology.

AI-generated photos, at this point, we've all seen tons of blurry, weird photos with

strange ears, extra fingers, hair that disappears into sweaters, and we go, oh, yeah, that's

an AI-generated photo.

The stuff we saw that was coming out of the pixel phones,

it looks really good. There wasn't a telltale blur. Like, it was just, it was pretty uncanny.

Some of the photos didn't completely pass, like, the BS test, but a lot of them did. A lot of them did,

and they were, they were quite, like, alarming.

Yeah, I mean, what are some kind of troubling examples that your team came up with?

So put a helicopter crash in a stream, added potholes to a street, like a car crash to an intersection, a bomb in a subway.

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