I am a scavenger and I find it a point of pride to rebuild and reuse electronics. Imagine my surprise when I found a camera in the dumpster with someone’s wedding photos! This photographer captured some truly emotional and beautiful moments on one of the most important days of a person’s life. I consider it a privilege and honor to be unintentionally included in these intimate moments.
Does that sound believable?
…
It does?
Don’t believe everything you read online!
This photo was generated by Google’s “Gemini 3 Pro Image” (which I think is the same as what they call “Nano Banana Pro”). As a developer, it costs less than 13 cents to make a 1MP image that looks photorealistic and could be used for anything from “virtual cosplay” and marketing to scamming and spamming.
This is a friendly reminder to never trust anything you see or read online without knowing THE SOURCE and THE REPUTATION of that source.
We’ve moved on from the “Information Age” into the “Age of Reputation”.
After posting this on linkedIn, I was pleasantly surprised to see that LinkedIn has a “Content Credentials” feature that shows the metadata from Google’s image generator. That’s handy but not foolproof.
If I had a good enough graphics card or paid for dedicated cloud infrastructure, I could get similar looking results with a private image generation model that probably wouldn’t have these ‘digital watermarks’.
Stay skeptical!