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A photograph of Earth glowing in deep space, the moon's cratered horizon stretching across its foreground, caught many people's eyes in April 2026. Astronauts captured the image while aboard NASA's Artemis II mission, and like the famous Apollo 8 "Earthrise" image, the picture felt instantly real and inspiring for many.But when almost anyone can fabricate a visually similar image in seconds from a text prompt using artificial intelligence, how do people decide which image is real?The proliferation of AI-generated science images in public spaces is not simply a misinformation problem. As a researcher who studies visual science communication and public trust, I believe it also contributes to a crisis of trust in science in the age of AI, and the tools scientists have long relied on to establish visual credibility are losing their grip.AI-generated images infiltrate scienceAI tools are already changing how scientific visuals are created, shared and publicized.Researchers use them to generate illustrations, create synthetic data, edit lab images and produce materials for education and public outreach.While AI can help scientists communicate complicated ideas more creatively and efficiently, these same tools blur the lines between illustration, enhancement and fabrication.In 2024, two papers were retracted after publishing AI-generated figures posessing biologically impossible structures. In April 2026, the New England Journal of Medicine retracted a paper after discovering that a clinical image had been manipulated with AI. These are just cases that came to mass public attention and are likely just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers have warned that AI-generated visuals pose growing threats in fields that depend heavily on visual evidence, such as materials science.NEJM Images in Clincal Medicine from last week retracted due to AI image manipulation. Look at the numbers on the ruler🤦🏻‍♂️https://t.co/lafNw15Kao pic.twitter.com/c66u5ZX8PkMay 2, 2026Academic publishers are beginning to adopt AI-detection tools. However, systems designed to detect fake images will almost always lag behind systems designed to create them. Many detectors can identify only image patterns they were trained to recognize. As new AI models emerge, developers must constantly obtain new data and retrain detectors to catch up.The biggest concern are realistic-looking visuals that subtly distort scientific details while remaining believable enough to pass initial review.Trust in scientific imagesFor decades, scientific images carried authority partly because they were difficult to produce. Creating microscope images, climate graphs and space photographs required expensive equipment, institutional resources and specialized expertise. Most people assumed such images represented true observations because very few people could make them.Research in science communication, including my own, suggests that people judge scientific visuals using a few mental shortcuts. Does the image look technically sophisticated? Does it come from a trusted institution? Does it match what I already believe? Generative AI is undermining all three of these heuristics, or mental shortcuts.Today, anyone can create a polished, scientific-looking image from a text prompt. Images are also detached from their original source when circulating online. When visual quality and institutional attribution become unreliable cues for judging the credibility of science images, people tend to fall back on something else: their own prior beliefs.This image of the Earth taken from the Artemis II mission in April 2026 is very much real. Does everyone believe it? (Image credit: NASA)As a result, authentic scientific images that challenge someone's existing beliefs can now be dismissed as AI-generated, whereas fabricated images that confirm them are easily accepted as evidence. AI, in this way, may amplify motivated reasoning — that is, people's tendency to accept what they already agree with and question what they do not.This shift matters because visuals have long served as evidence for scientific claims. Nonexpert audiences rely on images not only to see what scientists have discovered but also to develop an emotional connection and perceive credibility in the science being presented.If audiences stop trusting visual evidence altogether, science loses one of its most powerful tools for public communication.Transparency, not restrictionAI tools offer real benefits for researchers communicating their work to diverse audiences. The challenge is using these tools without quietly transferring AI's credibility deficit onto the science the images are meant to convey.One practical path forward is for researchers to treat image provenance — where an image came from and how it was created — with the same seriousness they already apply to data provenance.Scientists routinely disclose funding resources, study methodologies and conflicts of interest. Similar standards may now be necessary for scientific images. Was AI used to generate or modify this image? Is it a direct observation, a simulation or an illustration? What exactly does the image represent, and how was it verified? Can it be replicated by other researchers?My colleagues and I found that people's familiarity with AI significantly shapes how they judge the credibility of AI-generated visuals. Those familiar with AI tools were more likely to view AI disclosure as a sign of transparency, and some rated clearly labeled AI-generated content as more credible than unlabeled content.Transparency gives audiences the necessary context to evaluate what they are seeing, but it may not resolve every dispute about how images are made. Responsible use of AI-generated scientific images will require honesty, adherence to professional norms and the collective development of evidence-based standards across fields.Why authentic images remain powerfulThe original Apollo 8 "Earthrise" photograph of 1968 carries significant emotional impact. So do the Artemis II images of 2026.What makes them meaningful is not simply their beauty. It is their traceable connection to scientific reality. When people look at these photographs of planets, they also know there are astronauts, physical cameras, documented missions and verifiable observations behind the images. In this sense, authenticity is a documented relationship between an image and the world.In the age of generative AI, scientific institutions can no longer assume audiences will automatically trust their visuals. Trust now depends on transparency, documentation and clear communication about how visual evidence is produced.Without guidelines and standards, science risks entering a world where every image can be questioned and no image carries inherent credibility.This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ancient Roman transportation engineers built a vast network of roads that stretched across Europe, North Africa and parts of the Middle East. This complex road system was a key to travel and trade in the Roman Empire, and many of the centuries-old streets had a reputation for being extremely straight, although not all of them were. For instance, Via Appia (Appian Way), which connected Rome to the port of Brundisium in southern Italy, was more than 300 miles (500 kilometers) long, and sizable parts of it were straight. Another Roman road, Stane Street in southern England, was built to connect London to Chichester. Much of the road, which stretches roughly 57 miles (92 km), is straight. The Middle East also had straight Roman roads, including a coastal avenue from Antioch, Turkey, to what is now Gaza.A recent mapping project was able to map about 186,400 miles (300,000 km) of roads and more are probably undiscovered. But how did the Romans avoid unnecessary twists and turns to ensure straight streets? The answer may lie in three surveying instruments the Romans used. Surveying roadsIn some instances, the Romans built on top of older roads that existed before they conquered an area. Their "road network incorporated older roads from a broad range of different societies and polities," Marion Kruse, an associate professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, told Live Science in an email.But when the Romans built new roads, they used a few different tools to help plan them. "Three instruments were used consistently by Roman road builders: the dioptra, the groma, and the chorobatus [or chorobates]," Adriana Panaite, a researcher at the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology in Romania who has studied Roman roads extensively, told Live Science in an email.Sign up for our newsletter(Image credit: Marilyn Perkins / Future)Sign up for our weekly Life's Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they appear online.While the dioptra is known from ancient texts, no example of it has ever been found in an archaeological dig, according to M.J.T. Lewis, who was a historian at the University of Hull in the U.K. In his book "Surveying Instruments of Greece and Rome" (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Lewis noted that the design of the dioptra varied considerably. The different designs tended to include a stand and a disc-shaped base with a tube-shaped sighting instrument attached. An ancient surveyor could look through the tube and see a distant object without extraneous light interfering, allowing for a better view.The chorobatus was used to measure horizontal planes. Around 20 feet (6 meters) long, the chorobatus was a beam of wood on legs and looked like a small table, Lewis wrote. It likely had small weights hanging from it to show that the beam was level. No ancient example of the chorobatus has survived, and the exact design and way it was used are unclear. Ancient texts indicate that it acted as a builder's level that could help set up level points and determine elevations.But the most important tool Roman surveyors used was the groma, Joseph Lewis, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who has conducted extensive research on Roman roads, told Live Science in an email. The "groma was the principal tool of the mensor ‪—‬ the land surveyor ‪—‬ when planning long, straight alignments," he noted. "These alignments were then often used when constructing roads across gentle terrain."A cross section of a Roman road. (Image credit: DEA PICTURE LIBRARY via Getty Images)The groma, also called a gruma or croma, consisted of a vertical pole with a horizontal X-shaped cross on top and four small weights hanging down from strings at the ends of the crossbeams, Lewis said. The groma was most useful for establishing right angles.Multiple Roman surveyors could use the weights on their poles to ensure any road they were building was going in the right direction. "A surveyor at one end will direct other surveyors to move their poles until they are in line with one another," Lewis explained. "Once the direction had been established, Roman surveyors observed the landscape and adjusted the course of a road to accommodate/avoid obstacles such as steep sections which would have posed difficulties for wheeled vehicles, locations to ford rivers, or to connect pre-existing settlements."However, the techniques used to build roads throughout the Roman Empire probably varied somewhat, meaning experts "should be cautious about assuming that there was a single 'Roman' technique for road building," Kruse said. He noted that the Roman Empire covered a vast area and lasted for a long period of time. "It seems safe to assume that practices varied across time and space," Kruse explained.Not all roads were straightOne reason for the variation in Roman roads was likely the diversity of the laborers who built them. "In all likelihood, road-building work was done by a mix of soldiers, slaves ‪—‬ especially prisoners ‪—‬ and free locals called upon to help as part of a 'corvee' obligation imposed by their local community on Rome's instructions," Richard Talbert, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Live Science in an email. But paid laborers were probably used for some skilled tasks, such as building bridges, Talbert said.While Roman roads have a reputation for being precisely laid out and straight, not all of them were. Related mysteriesWhat happened to the Minoan civilization?What if Antony and Cleopatra had defeated Octavian?Were there female gladiators in ancient Rome?"It is commonly mentioned that Roman roads were exceptionally straight. This is partially true: The Romans had engineers and a large labor force that in some cases managed to modify the landscape to enable straight roads," Tom Brughmans, a classical archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who is part of a team that helped create an updated map of the Roman road system, told Live Science in an email."We believe that the Romans preferred relatively straight roads in places where there was very little friction offered by the topography," such as flatland areas, Brughmans said. But in areas with more difficult terrain, such as mountainous regions, the roads would often not run straight. Brughmans said he expects "future research will show that, in general, [Roman roads] are less straight than modern roads, given the need for motorized vehicles to avoid sharp turns when driving at speed." From Augustus to Nero, see how much you know about ancient Rome's famous leaders with our Roman emperor quiz!