The Real Photograph Is Now on Trial

Two kinds of past in the same feed

Political figures joined the trend. Piyush Goyal posted an AI-generated portrait captioned as his contribution to the ’80s trend. Kiren Rijiju first shared an AI version and then followed it with an actual photograph from the decade. Shashi Tharoor joined “the old-fashioned way” by sharing genuine family photographs from the 1980s. The posts placed synthetic nostalgia and documented history inside the same visual feed.

That juxtaposition creates a problem deeper than whether one amusing portrait might fool someone.

Two images can both be authentic digital files: each may exist exactly as uploaded, with an identifiable source and an unaltered chain of custody. But only one may record an event that actually occurred. Proving that a file is genuine is therefore not identical to proving that the scene represented by it is true.

What evidence law can, and cannot, settle

The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 recognises electronic and digital records as evidence. Sections 61 to 63 address their admissibility and the conditions through which electronic records may be proved. Those provisions matter when a photograph enters litigation, but admissibility does not automatically establish the truth of everything visible inside the image.

A court may still need to consider provenance, metadata, the device or system that produced the file, corroborating evidence, witness testimony and signs of generation or manipulation.

The liar’s dividend

The larger danger is sometimes described as the liar’s dividend. Once synthetic media becomes common, a person confronted with a genuine photograph, recording or video gains an easy response: “That could be AI.”

The ability to manufacture convincing falsehoods can therefore weaken genuine evidence as well. AI does not only make lies believable. It makes truth deniable.

The ’80s trend is largely playful. That does not make every generated portrait unlawful, nor does it mean every post requires courtroom-level proof. But it demonstrates how quickly invented imagery can acquire the visual texture of memory, and why future disputes will increasingly concern not only what an image shows, but how we know it came to exist.

So, the question is: how will we prove the real photograph?

As generated imagery becomes ordinary, provenance, metadata, contextual evidence and verification systems become increasingly important.