Fake Images Are Getting Harder and Harder to Detect
Images and videos usually serve as the most concrete, the most unarguable, and the most honest evidence of experiences and events we cannot witness ourselves. This is often the case in court, in the news, in scientific research, and in our daily lives. We trust images much more deeply and instinctively than we do words. Words, we know, can lie. But that trust makes it all the more shocking—and serious—when images lie to us, too.
Photoshop isn’t entirely to blame. Doctoring photographs long predates software—Mussolini famously had his horse handler removed from a taken in 1942 so it would appear he was able to control the horse himself—but software certainly makes altering images easier, cheaper, faster, more convincing, and much more widespread than ever before. (Thankfully, most alterations are done out vanity—though even some of these can stir up considerable controversy. In 2014, for example, the website Jezebel a $10,000 reward to anyone who would provide it with unretouched photographs of Lena Dunham taken for .)
