If you're looking for an image that perfectly showcases the confusion and chaos of a choose-your-own-reality information dystopia, you probably couldn't do better than yesterday's portrait of Catherine, Princess of Wales. In just one day, the photograph has transformed from a hastily released piece of public-relations damage control into something of a Rorschach test--a collision between plausibility and conspiracy. For the uninitiated: Yesterday, in celebration of Mother's Day in the U.K., the Royal Family released a portrait on Instagram of Kate Middleton with her three children. But this was no ordinary photo. Middleton has been away from the public eye since December reportedly because of unspecified health issues, leading to a ceaseless parade of conspiracy theories. Royal watchers and news organizations naturally pored over the image, and they found a number of alarming peculiarities.

An amateur photographer who goes by the name "ibreakphotos" decided to do an experiment on his Samsung phone last month to find out how a feature called "space zoom" actually works. The feature, first released in 2020, claims a 100x zoom rate, and Samsung used sparkling clear images of the Moon in its marketing. Ibreakphotos took his own pictures of the Moon--blurry and without detail--and watched as his phone added craters and other details. The phone's artificial intelligence software was using data from its "training" on many other pictures of the Moon to add detail where there was none. "The Moon pictures from Samsung are fake," he wrote, leading many to wonder whether the shots people take are really theirs anymore--or if they can even be described as photographs. Samsung has defended the technology, saying it does not "overlay" images, and pointed out that users can switch off the function.

The new feature aims to make the process of submitting images through their iOS app easier for users. Shutterstock requires contributors to add between seven and 50 keywords to their images when uploading them to the system, to help customers find appropriate images for their needs. Their app uses artificial intelligence to review metadata and pixel data to suggest several keywords for the images contributors are uploading, that users can tap to select. It works by using computer vision technology to locate visually similar images to the uploaded image, and automatically suggest and previously successful keywords for the user to select. The tool is being launched for mobile initially, to make the process of submitting images when using the smaller keyboard of a mobile phone easier.