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101. What’s the simplest way to describe TTG?
TTG is a label for photos (and videos) that retain their value as a record.
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There is nothing exotic or exclusive about photos that qualify for the TTG label. Members of the public see countless TTG-qualified photos every day, from personal snapshots to widely published news photos.
The About page has more on TTG and its background.
• Why bother using the TTG label?
• Nothing about TTG is arbitrary
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102. Why was the TTG label created?
To help identify trustworthy images and trustworthy image sources.
There are now billions of pictures that look like undoctored photographs but are not — and viewers want to know what’s what.
There are two ways of labeling images in response
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103. How can TTG stop the flood of AI-generated pictures?
No one can stop the flood; it will only get worse.
The key is finding “islands of trust” in the sea of AI “slop.”
The only way to find those islands is by capitalizing on the public’s appetite for authenticity.
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104. Why does TTG say it “protects a future for photography”?
Because the biggest threat to photography’s future is AI-generated content (AI-GC), and TTG is the largest category of photos from which images are disqualified when any AI-GC is added.
Many non-TTG branches of photography are moving to a “hybrid” model, adding into the image area more and more non-photographic content in the form of AI-generated content.
“TTG is all about trustworthiness, and the use of AI-generated content never increases the trustworthiness of a photographic record.” —From the FAQ on AI-GC
Why some photographers opt to not add AI-GC
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105. What do newcomers find most surprising about TTG?
Realizing that “it’s not just about ‘how the picture looks’ anymore.”
For almost 200 years, photographers made any undetectable improvements they could to their photos—
— and then TTG comes along and suggests forgoing visual improvements even when viewers can’t detect those manipulations?
It’s the photographer’s choice
(The second-most surprising thing to newcomers is in FAQ #202.)
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106. What kinds of photos is the TTG label for?
The TTG label is useful in any contexts where viewers wonder whether they are seeing undoctored photographs.
That means the label can be helpful with far more kinds of images than just news and reportage photos.
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107. What kinds of photos is the TTG label not suited for?
Any kinds of photographs that are typically doctored — or augmented with AI — before being put before viewers.
Some of the more prominent categories
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108. How does TTG draw the line on manipulation?
It’s very simple: “Light” is the root of all photography, so TTG uses the behavior of light to “draw the line” on manipulations.
How TTG is based on “light”
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109. Why will “trust tests” be needed in the future when they weren’t needed in the past?
Because it is increasingly difficult to tell undoctored photos from AI-enhanced images “just by looking.”
As explained in #103 (above), the only reliable way to avoid deception is to continually identify which image sources can be trusted — and there is no way apart from trust tests to constantly check which photo publishers are trustworthy.
Why is it so hard to judge others’ trustworthiness?
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110. But how can three little letters (TTG) help the public identify trusted, “go-to” photo publishers?
TTG makes it easy for image publishers to declare themselves on how large a priority they place on trust.
“Trust is as trust does”
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111. Why does TTG say it takes a new approach to resolving “The Digital Dilemma”?
Because TTG isn’t some dry “policy statement” that no one reads, no one heeds, and no one personally guarantees.
TTG’s approach is built on accountability
What is “The Digital Dilemma”?
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112. What are the rules for attaching the TTG label?
Apart from P1’s prohibition against putting anything into the image area, there are no rules (just as there are no rules for the “Nonfiction” label that is applied to books.)
No other rules are necessary, because it is always in the interest of any photo publisher who uses the TTG label to use it well.
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113. Does TTG regard photographs as “facts”? Does TTG claim that “photographs never lie”?
No, TTG is built on 21st-century attitudes toward photographs, not on outdated thinking from the past.
Times have changed.
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114. What is meant in #102 by “there are billions of images that look like undoctored photographs but are not”?
There are 3 main categories of images that fit that description: doctored photos, aigmented photos, and plaigis.
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115. Does #114 mean that viewers might eventually designate every image that looks like a photo as either “TTG” or “non-TTG”?
That could happen, but it’s up to factors beyond TTG’s control.
TTG only identifies which images actually are undoctored photos. Any characterizations of non-TTG images will evolve as the public chooses.
What happens will depend on one big question
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116. Why does TTG disqualify popular effects that are easy to do on smartphones, like blurring out undesirable areas by adding artificial bokeh, erasing unwanted things, adding attractive lighting effects, and reshaping things in the photo to correct perspective?
One reason is that the TTG label guarantees the presence of the characteristics that are shared by the world’s most-widely trusted photos, and the effects listed in #116 are not done to those photos.
Another reason is that there is no way to put limits on the effects listed in #116 to keep them from being carried to untrustworthy extremes...
. . . and the TTG label would be a joke if “extremely untrustworthy” photos could earn that label.
More reasons
“You can manipulate a photo any way you want, but you can’t manipulate it any way you want and then expect people to trust it.”
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117. Doctored photographs have been around since photography was invented. Why start worrying about them now?
Because undetectably doctored photographs were rare before the digital age but they are common now.
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118. I understand how image-providing organizations can benefit from publishing the TTG label with the name of the photographer. But why would photographers stake their reputation on the label?
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119. How will TTG relate to upcoming technologies that can provide proof that an image has not been doctored?
TTG was designed to capitalize on those technologies, which will increasingly prompt viewers of striking published images to insist, “Show me the original!”
The Trust Test is ideal for analyzing the differences between the verifiably unaltered original (the “Before” picture) and the final edited version that is put before viewers (the “After” picture).
For more on this, see FAQ #2519.
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120. Won’t all of the amazing new ways of changing photographs after they are recorded make TTG obsolete?
No, there’s no chance of that happening.
To qualify as TTG, a photograph has to be left essentially as recorded.
Thus most of the flashy new ways of changing photographs after they are recorded will not apply to TTG at all.
From TTG’s perspective, AI-generated content is merely the latest way of depicting something other than what the camera saw.
In fact, one of the most universal attitudes about making changes to images in the digital age — “I’ll fix it in post” — is generally meaningless when it comes to making any non-“light”-related changes to TTG photographs.
More on #120
The numbering of the FAQ questions will not change — any new questions are added at the bottom and given new numbers — so users can safely make a link to any specific question.