These photoshop comments are missing the point that it’s just like art, a good edit that can fool everyone needs someone that practiced a lot and has lots of experience, now even the lazy asses on the right can fake it easily.
I think this comment misses the point that even one doctored photo created by a team of highly skilled individuals can change the course of history. And when that’s what it takes, it’s easier to sell it to the public.
What matters is the source. What we’re being forced to reckon with now is: the assumption that photos capture indisputable reality has never and will never be true. That’s why we invented journalism. Ethically driven people to investigate and be impartial sources of truth on what’s happening in the world. But we’ve neglected and abused the profession so much that it’s a shell of what we need it to be.
The thing is that in the future the mere quantity of fakes will make the careful vetting process you describe physically impossible. You will be bombarded with high quality fakes to such an extent that you will simply have to give up trying to keep up, so it will be a choice of either dropping the vetting process or dropping bringing any pictures altogether. For profit driven corporate jwbed media outlets, the choice unfortunately will be obvious.
I’m not talking about vetting pictures. I’m talking about journalists who investigate issues THEMSELVES and uncover the truth. They take their OWN pictures and post them on their website and accounts putting their credibility as collateral. We trust them, not because it’s a picture, but because of who took it.
This already happened with text, people learned “Don’t believe everything you read!” And invented the press to figure out the truth. It used to be a core part of our society. But people were tricked into thinking pictures and video were somehow mediums of empirical truth, just because it’s HARD to fake. But never impossible. Which is worse, actually. So we neglected the press and let it collapse into a shit show because we thought we could do it ourselves.
Yeah, it is going to be mainly a quantity issue rather than a quality one. The quality of faked photos has already been high since photoshop. Now a constant growing avalanche of high quality fakes (produced by all sorts of different vested interests with their own particular purposes) is going to barrage us on a daily basis, simply because it is cheap and easy
