In his latest project, Phillip Toledano uses AI to reimagine Robert Capa's lost D-Day images, challenging our understanding of truth and memory in an age where reality can be reshaped.
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00:00Because AI now exists, everything is true and nothing is true.
00:07Our relationship with the image has fundamentally changed.
00:10And we're moving, I think we're at a really critical point of, like, what's real anymore?
00:15We don't really know.
00:28In 1944, a very famous photographer, Robert Capa, stepped off the boats in Normandy, on Omaha Beach,
00:35and he shot, the story goes, four rolls of film, sent the film back to England,
00:39where some poor hapless lab assistant messed up the developing,
00:43and only 11 images of his D-Day landing shot survived.
00:46So he created this empty pocket of history, which I thought I could fill with AI.
00:52So I've recreated or reimagined a lost roll of Robert Capa's film from D-Day.
00:58But the point really is not so much about D-Day and Robert Capa, it's really about,
01:03if I can so convincingly reinvent and recreate the past, just imagine what I can do with the present.
01:14The thing I always say about AI, it's like working with a really talented but really drunk person.
01:18It still makes mistakes, so you have to check for, you know,
01:21make sure the faces look right, you have to make sure things feel right.
01:25One of the things that people always have a go at me for, for AI, and they say,
01:28well, you're just, you know, sitting at a screen and typing in words, which is absolutely true,
01:32but so are journalists, so do writers, that's what they do.
01:36So AI, for me, is more akin in some ways to writing than, or to movie making, than it is to photography.
01:42It just happens to look like photography, but the creative process is completely different.
01:55This is what I would like to have happen, is people walk through the exhibition,
01:59not knowing it's AI, and they find the images powerful, they find them moving, they find them human.
02:05And then, at the end, they realize they've been fooled.
02:09And to me, this is going to mirror our experience on a regular basis with imagery.