The Book of Veles, photographer Jonas Bendiksen’s latest project, is a fresh and unnerving mediation on authenticity, veracity and truth – questions that have dogged photojournalism with every new advance in imagemaking. 

Ostensibly a photobook on the small Macedonian town of Veles, which made international headlines in 2016 as the unlikely factory of pro-Trump fake news, The Book of Veles created a furore after Bendiksen revealed that the project’s images were synthetically generated using 3D software and the book’s text was written entirely by artificial intelligence. 

Fascinated with the story of Veles as well as with developments in synthetic imagery, Bendiksen set out to see just how “real” he could make his images. Although he left breadcrumbs throughout the text, to his surprise the book was published in April 2021 to “nice, positive echo-chamber feedback,” said Bendiksen. No one questioned the authenticity of the images or text. He stepped up the game by then submitting his manipulated photographs to the world’s most prestigious photojournalism festival Visa pour l’image which screened his images in September.

“I thought, what could be a higher threshold for fooling someone with junk, synthetic images than this crowd?,” said Bendiksen. “I gave it 24 hours for someone to come with some questions about the work. It didn’t happen.” The photographer’s final attempt to out himself involved buying a squadron of Facebook and Twitter bots to attack him online. The bots posted dozens of messages claiming that his work was fraudulent, only to have Bendiksen’s colleagues and supporters rush to his defense.

Bendiksen finally came clean in an interview on September 17 with Magnum Photos. We spoke with Bendiksen about what he’s come away with from the experience and how the project has continued to take unexpected turns even after his revelation last month.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you start by telling us about how your project came together and what surprised you along the way?

I found this Veles story so fascinating, but by then the websites had closed down, the algorithms had changed, they were out of business. So I realized the only way I can really explore that story in Veles is by creating my own imaginary version of it.
It spoke to me that if synthetic technology has gotten to the point where one averagely nerdy freelance photographer can go into his basement, look at some YouTube tutorials and create a whole photographic documentary from scratch, then we are in trouble. Can I with no prior experience fake it altogether?

So I went to Veles, I photographed a bunch of empty locations and downloaded free software to create 3D models.
Bringing these avatars to life, I found it frightening. I was scaring myself because I saw how easy this is to do and how lifelike they are. It was like seeing myself wake this Frankenstein monster to life.

On one hand I thought I should stop now, on the other I was wondering how far can this go? The fact that I can do this with no understanding or training of how this works, it says something of the things to come.

What were the main goals that you set out with?

I wanted to create some discussion and awareness around this technology but I didn’t go into this project wanting it to be just a technical demonstration of something. I get into my projects because it’s a good story to tell. If it hadn’t been for all these exciting layers of Veles and mythology I wouldn’t have done this. All of these parts of the puzzle fell miraculously into place.

Yes, tell us more about how the puzzle fell into place, there are so many bizarre layers to this project.

One was the discovery of the historical layers to the story. The town Veles is named after this pre-Christian Slavic god who was a kind of sneaky guy, a shapeshifter who turns into a bear, a god of chaos and deception and magic. I thought he would probably be super happy about all this deception going on in Veles.

Then I came across this discovery of an ancient epic manuscript found by a Russian army officer and a historian in 1919 called the Book of Veles. It’s still quite a popular text in nationalist and new-agey circles.
The thing is of course all modern historians and linguists have concluded that it’s a forgery.
Nobody quite knows why they did it, they didn’t get really famous for it or make much money. That’s an interesting parallel to these misinformation efforts in Veles.

Other layers kept falling onto my head.
I realized that the development in artificial text generation is also moving very fast. There is software by Open AI which is available to the common man for free.

I fed it all available articles by reporters who went to Veles in 2016 when the original media story broke and this AI system then wrote this 5,000 word introductory essay to the book about my experiences in Veles.

The introduction written by AI is still a bit clumsy. Some of your images, especially the one of a bear stomping through town, feel like they should have set off some alarm bells. Yet it was all “real” enough that no one questioned it.

That was also something that frightened me. The technology in the field has developed a lot even from when I started using it to when the project was done. It’s clear to me that within a few years 95% or more of people will have a hard time decoding whether an article was written by a New York Times journalist or a bot. I wanted this to be a look into what I think is the near future of our information landscape.

How are our current concerns about automation or AI different from all the previous technology scares?

In photography at every step when there is a new technology people say it’s the collapse of truth. Whether that was when digital cameras came or when Photoshop showed up. People always cried wolf like that. Maybe I’m the same and this is a bunch of wolf crying and this will sort itself out nicely.

But I think the difference is: automation and synthetics. We will always have good journalism but I think it will be mixed in with so much synthetic junk or half synthetic junk that it will just be very, very chaotic and difficult to navigate. The difference is that the automation of it gives it such a bigger potential for spread and makes it so difficult to contain.

You’ve repeatedly compared your work to a penetration test that hackers run searching for vulnerabilities in their code. These tests then allow companies to better fortify their software and find solutions for loopholes in the code. What did your stress test reveal and what solutions did it reveal to you?

I’m not trying to pretend I have all the answers but I think there are many levels to it. I think the content verification business will be an industry unto itself. This is also a call out to social media platforms who I believe have failed us in many ways on this front thus far to step up the game. This is a call out to our education system. As a father of four, I’m wondering how my children are going to handle this. To be a functional citizen in the next 50 years, navigating the information space should be at least as important a subject as mathematics in schools.

We as content creators, journalists, photographers, editors, publications, we all have roles to play in this. We have to strengthen institutions and publications that work for in-depth, context based journalism and storytelling.

To me this is not an issue that is in any way limited to the photography community, this is a societal issue: the question of how in the next years and decades we navigate a landscape where people are manipulating information so easily in so many ways.

That’s an issue for democracy.
The goal of disinformation, or at least one of its results, is the breakdown of trust between people, between people and institutions. There’s a reason why a channel like RT for example has the slogan, Question More. But there’s a delicate balance between the need for more critical thinking and the need for more trust isn’t there?

This is the big issue, right? This is the central question, this question of trust. We are dependent on trust for functional societies. We’re seeing this fragmentation of the information landscape.
We’re losing the common denominator. The common narrative is disappearing. We’re already losing the idea that we share a common experience or common truth.

That’s an unfortunate truth and a consequence of this technology. We have to try to create systems where we somehow contain it. We employ technology to help fight back which is of course an arms race.

This story continues to go in unexpected directions. Tell us about the latest.

A junk information site pretending to be a newspaper in Texas called Texas News Today came out from a very similar story that was stolen from Wired about my project. I think it’s automated: they suck stuff into their system, rewrite it and then it gets blasted out again on all these websites which look very similar to what the fake news websites out of Veles were doing. It’s the same business model. I looked into it and it turns out these people at Texas News Today are a junk news site based in Pune, India running a bunch of sites from this location in different languages.

Now, these fake news sites are stealing stories about my fake news project. And there are people quoting the fake writer who supposedly wrote the piece as some credible source. It’s full circle. There you can see the whole mechanism of the chaos.