Instead of turning light into pictures, it turns ideas into pictures.

This new kind of camera replicates what your imagination does. It receives words and then synthesizes a picture from its experience seeing millions of other pictures. The output doesn’t have a name yet, but I’ll call it a synthograph (meaning synthetic drawing).

Photography can capture moments that happened, but synthography is not bound by the limitations of reality. Synthography can capture moments that did not happen and moments that could never happen.

Taking a great syntho is about stimulating the imagination of the camera. Synthography doesn’t require you to be anywhere or anywhen in particular.

Photography is an important medium of expression because it is so accessible and instantaneous. Synthography will even further reduce barriers to entry, and give everyone the power to convert ideas into pictures.

The criticisms I have been seeing about the features of the Pixel 8, however, feel like we are only repeating the kinds of fears of nearly two hundred years. We have not been able to wholly trust photographs pretty much since they were invented. The only things which have changed in that time are the ease with which the manipulations can happen, and their availability.

We all live with a growing sense that everything around us is fraudulent. It is striking to me how these tools have been introduced as confidence in institutions has declined. It feels like a death spiral of trust — not only are we expected to separate facts from their potentially misleading context, we increasingly feel doubtful that any experts are able to help us, yet we keep inventing new ways to distort reality.

The questions that are being asked of the Pixel 8’s image manipulation capabilities are good and necessary because there are real ethical implications. But I think they need to be more fully contextualized. There is a long trail of exactly the same concerns and, to avoid repeating ourselves yet again, we should be asking these questions with that history in mind. This era feels different. I think we should be asking more precisely why that is.

The questions we ask about generative technologies should acknowledge that we already have plenty of ways to lie, and that lots of the information we see is suspect. That does not mean we should not believe anything, but it does mean we ought to be asking questions about what is changed when tools like these become more widespread and easier to use.