Mind that this about none of these. It is about what images mean to us, how we are accustomed to read them, and how this may be thus invalidated, or, even worse, how these simulacra may produce a false vector pointing towards us, including any notion of change or variety, as they are universally deemed to (pre)serve a narrative of how we became what. No clocks involved. (As for the public image, as opposed to historians and their curated interpretation, think of them more as a talisman for reality than a record of reality, it just happens so that these aspects currently/still tend to overlap.)
PS: I'm pretty sure, at least Shane Balkowitsch, as someone producing in the ancient process of wet plates, is quite aware of the aspects of the image as a produced image, produced by certain processes, under certain circumstances of production, as an opus operatum bearing all the marks – and what goes with this. What does it mean to extend this lineage to modern captures, to incorporate modern imagery into this ancestry? Surely, there's an intend and some understanding. What does it mean, if the image isn't anymore an opus operatum in the traditional sense, but just a generated one, generated by an imperative prompt, if its depiction isn't the trace of a real subject (as in likeness), but extracted from a compressed semantic field built from a biased aspect of assorted imagery and controlled by a REL instance trained to select pleasing images? What does this mean to us, when the photo loses its quality as an index? Or, worse, if we still pretend that there should be such an index, just because we're accustomed to this – and the texture feels like it?