There are many mistakes in the Kate Middleton photo

Why Kate Middleton’s Photo Looks Like a Fake Job? The Case of the Royal Family and the Prince of Queen Elizabeth II

Kate Middleton’s botched photo editing job seen around the world is more than just catnip for tabloids and TikTok conspiracy theorists. It’s also the most instructive illustration of the AI-flecked new reality we live in, a maelstrom formed when distrust and established processes converge and create chaos.

Unfortunately, the image released was sloppy. The bad photo job was so bad that several press agencies advised people not to use it. These types of notices are rare and fueled a renewed interest in Middleton’s whereabouts. The furor has also spurred CNN to review all previous photos received from Kensington Palace.

The royal family used the photo as a way to signal that the princess is in good spirits, after she had been absent from public view for months due to abdominal surgery.

The British royal family is like a corporation without an underlying business, a C-suite that is image only. The job is meant to be a representation of the UK. The person who most clearly understood this was Queen Elizabeth II’s now-deceased prince consort, Philip, who sometimes called his family “the Firm”; he was, as an infant, exiled from Greece after a revolution. The royal family must be visible and beloved or else it is in danger of being abolished. There are serious consequences if the royals don’t care for their fandom.

The Wild West of a Kill Notice? Is it the Wild West? How the AP, Getty Images and WIRED look at the family Christmas photos of Princess Charlotte

Kill notices are incredibly rare and unusual. The number of kills could be counted on one hand, according to a wire service source. AP says it publishes thousands of stories and a million pictures a year. Getty Images covers 160,000 events annually. That a kill notice of this magnitude happened is a big deal.

It’s rare because wire services established relationships with the organizations that submit images, like the United Nations or NASA, for example. You and I aren’t accepted by AP to share images from randos. The palace knows the editorial rules around what kind of material agencies will accept, making what they did even more brazen and a serious breach of protocol.

Wire services have clear rules about what’s acceptable and what’s not — AP allows minor cropping and color adjustments but disallows the removal of “red eye,” for example. For everyone else, it is the Wild West. There is no vetting process for altered photos on IG, where the picture remains up without a note from the palace. There is a bright red alert at the bottom of the photo and video. The altered photo was reviewed by fact-checkers.

The edges on the children’s sweaters, and the area around Princess Charlotte’s hand, were manipulated via photo-editing software, and are easy to see when you zoom in on the royal photo closely. For example, parts of Middleton’s hair appear to have unnatural texture, and her jacket has a zip that leads nowhere.

“My guess is that the errors are coming from the stamp tool,” says WIRED design director Alyssa Walker. “It fuses the image together by pulling another part of the image.” When used haphazardly, this type of content stamp tool could easily introduce errors to an image, like the edges of clothing appearing to be cut off at random with poorly defined outlines.

It does not seem odd to me that a person whose job is being beautiful in public might use any tool available to make the shot perfect. It is, after all, notoriously difficult to get a photo of three children where no one is making a weird face or has their eyes closed. Our family Christmas photos, where the goal was for all of us to look good at the same time, were hard on the oldest of five. I would not be surprised to find out that this is a composite image where the best shot of everyone in it was used. Thanks to the help of Artificial Intelligence, the public knows where to look for manipulated images: hair, hands, edges.

All this public speculation can be settled. A neck-up video might show a woman thanking everyone and then saying that she would like to rest. That hasn’t happened. We have gotten at least one photo from the photographer, but it wasn’t legit and didn’t run in the UK. The other, presumably “authorized,” (whatever that means!) shows Middleton with William, facing away from the camera. This image was released after the photoshopped one. It has not helped.

Let’s look at recent events with that context in mind. A few months later in December, two outlets claimed that the prince and his wife would make a trip to Italy. The trip was abruptly canceled in January of this year, because of Middleton’s surgery. So whatever happened, it was unplanned; Kensington would hardly signal a trip that it knew the princess couldn’t take. Until the bad Mother’s Day Photoshop, the last time an image of Middleton showed up on Kensington Palace’s Instagram was December 29th, as part of a year-in-review montage.

Over the course of decades, the official reporting about it has been unreliable. Kitty Kelley’s The Royals was regarded by no less than Christopher Hitchens as a serious exposé, and it details, among other things, how the family attempted to hide their German connections during World War II. The upsetting stories of Princess Margaret’s bad behavior made her sister, the Queen, look better. Though Prince Harry has his own motives, many of his claims in his novel are true and the royal press office shied away from defending his wife. King Charles III’s office will leak unflattering stories about other members of the family. There was a monarchy-shaking event called Princess Diana.

I have seen some tech reporters wonder if this is the end of shared reality. This is not a misunderstanding of how we got here. I follow the royal family primarily because they are a pack of hilarious nitwits, but they also provide a masterclass in media manipulation.

Royal watchers know perfectly well that the Firm engages in media manipulation; for instance, as royals reporter Ellie Hall makes clear, royal press offices very rarely go on the record. “Phrases like ‘this reporter understands’ or ‘this news outlet can confirm’ are very common in stories about the royal family,” Hall notes. For any seasoned watcher that means the press office is involved.