When I grew up, my friends dad had a picture taken of his British public school class taken circa 1955. In this photo, which was taken by a slowly rotating panorama camera, a lad started at the beginning of the photo, on the viewers left. Once the camera panned enough that he was out of frame, he sprinted behind the bleachers to the viewers far right, and took his place on the bleachers before the camera panned to take his picture for a second time.
Kindly, if you grew up after this picture was taken, and you believed the guideline “a photo never lies,” you were wrong.
> now we have a healthy distrust of pictures we're not sure where they came from.
Respectfully, we only wish this were the case. There are, right now, AI generated images and videos of a presidential candidate in a disaster area. People want to believe they are real. And so to millions of people, they are real.
People do the same with faked nudes. They will believe in those nudes because they believe that women are inherently sinful (huzzah for "original sin") and absolutely would do such things.
Oh, and Photoshop never had a dedicated app (or 100 dedicated apps) for creating nudes from regular photos and/or videos. It took a skill a scant fraction of a percent of people had.
I should have remembered that I'm writing to an audience prone to passionate literalism...
I'm of course aware that there were forged photos back in the day. But they were rare and hard to make. They were usually paper only. Producing a fake negative was really hard, and a forensic expert could often spot it.
Photoshop and other advances long since killed that certainty, and now we have a healthy distrust of pictures we're not sure where they came from.
I expect videos will now walk a similar path, and life will go on with no major disasters.