At a Giga event on trust and AI at the University of Geneva, the audience is asked to tell whether the image on the screen is real or AI-generated, on 15 October 2026. (Unicef/Rafael Duarte)

Artificial intelligence-generated images are flooding the internet at breakneck speed and are becoming increasingly realistic. The EU has responded with labelling rules, and standards bodies are building tools to show where an image came from. But experts don’t think these tools can entirely show whether an image is true. Photographers share the same belief: maintaining trust in a photo still depends on human input.

These tensions were the focus of a panel discussion last month around AI and truth in images, hosted in Geneva by Giga, a Unicef and ITU initiative working to connect all schools to the internet. The audience was asked to distinguish between synthetic images and real photos. As most participants mistakenly identified some authentic photographers as AI-generated, the experiment made it clear that perception and intuition alone are no longer enough for its distinction.

The evening took place behind the winning works of the Giga Photo Award, which bans AI-generated images. “This event focuses on generative AI precisely because of the questions it poses for photography today,” Daniel Ginsianmung, coordinator of the award, told Geneva Solutions.

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Volunteers and environmental technicians organised by the Chico Mendes Institute arrive to reforest an area of the National Park that was burned by fires in Brasilia, Brazil, 21 October, 2024. (Keystone/AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

🍁Nature making a comeback, says UN. Wildlife habitats are being restored “at an unprecedented rate” but are still far from meeting global targets to revive a third of the planet’s ecosystems by 2030, according to findings co-published by UN agencies on the sidelines of the Cop17 biodiversity summit in Armenia last month.

In numbers. Around 469 million hectares of degraded land and marine and freshwater habitats across 149 countries are under active restoration in 2026, according to the report tracking progress halfway through the UN decade on ecosystem restoration. However, this represents only about a quarter of the one billion hectares that countries committed to restoring in a historic agreement signed at Cop15 four years ago in Montreal, Canada.

Lumpy progress. While land ecosystems are on track – reaching almost half of the target – only 23 per cent of marine and coastal territories are being revived, with these degrading at the fastest rate.

The answer? Inevitably, more money. Funding is cited by the report's authors as one of the biggest hurdles. They say restoration finance would need to increase fourfold to meet 2030 targets, from $64 billion a year being spent today to $296 bn.

Jumping forward to Cop31. Ecosystem restoration is also featuring in high-stakes talks in Antalya this week, as countries grapple over how to make progress on cutting emissions and protect vulnerable nations from worsening climate impacts. On Monday, the Food and Agricultural Organization, one of the authors of the report, issued an urgent call to reverse deforestation, which has slowed over the last decade but is still is far behind targets, with trees key to storing carbon and limiting global warming.