At a time when suspicion of manipulated media has reached a new pitch of concern, the Princess of Wales photo furore underlines the sensitivity around image doctoring. Catherine was the subject of an image editing row in 2011 when Grazia adapted a photo of her on her wedding day – but that was before breakthroughs in artificial intelligence put everyone on edge. There has been a deluge of AI-generated deepfakes in recent years, from a video of Volodymyr Zelenskiy telling his soldiers to surrender, to explicit images of Taylor Swift. Historical examples of image manipulation can be clunky – from Argentine footballers clutching handbags to Stalin's missing underlings – but there is now an alarming credibility to AI-generated content. Catherine's attempts to adjust a family photo, amid frenzied social media speculation about her wellbeing, have run straight into widespread concerns about trust in images, text and audio in a year when half the world is going to the polls.

Google announced a series of upgrades to its Google Photos service, used by more than a billion users, at today's Google I/O developer event, which was virtually streamed this year due to COVID. The company is rolling out Locked Folders, new types of photo "Memories" for reminiscing over past events, as well as a new feature called "Cinematic moments" that will animate a series of static photos, among other updates. Today, Google Photos stores over 4 trillion photos and videos, but the majority of those are never viewed. To change that, Google has been developing AI-powered features to help its users reflect on meaningful moments from their lives. With Memories, launched in 2019, Google Photos is able to resurface photos and videos focused on people, activities and hobbies as well as recent highlights from the week prior.

Your family history is probably in photographs of the past, but thanks to machine learning and an app, they could be somewhat living once again. Technology can do some remarkable things, but one of the more unusual ones in recent years may be the field of deep fakes. It's a technology concept you'd have probably heard of whereby machine learning connects with visual imagery to join the dots and get one image to resemble a next, often in video. It's what happens when the face of one person is matched to the scene or video of another, and has been found used across the world in various ways, from news to ads to film and art. And now, it's being used with family photos, as a family history app and service connects the world of deep fake technology to family photos, giving them some life and reanimating their imagery.

Millions of people's private photos have been leveraged by the cloud photo service, Ever, to develop and sell facial recognition software without their consent says an exclusive report by NBC News. According to the report, Ever, which started in 2013 as a cloud-based app for storing and sharing photos, has recently started to pivot into a burgeoning field of facial recognition technology through its new arm, Ever AI. In order to train its software, which according to the company's web page, is capable of delivering'surveillance & monitoring, physical access control, and digital authentication,' it used the personal photos from its millions of its users without informing them first. According to the privacy policy and a statement from CEO of Ever, Doug Aley, the company does not distribute users' photos to third parties, but does use them to instruct its algorithm. Specifically, it leverages a facial recognition feature built into the Ever service which allows users to group photos of the same people by scanning their face.

What exactly are Cognitive Services and what are they for? Cognitive Services are a set of machine learning algorithms that Microsoft has developed to solve problems in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal of Cognitive Services is to democratize AI by packaging it into discrete components that are easy for developers to use in their own apps. Web and Universal Windows Platform developers can consume these algorithms through standard REST calls over the Internet to the Cognitive Services APIs. So why is it worthwhile to provide easy access to AI? Anyone watching tech trends realizes we are in the middle of a period of huge AI breakthroughs right now with computers beating chess champions, go masters and Turing tests.