[acdha]

That’s a great topic for late night dorm bull sessions but it’s not what we’re talking about here. People know that photographers can be selective about what and how they cover things, but there’s been an understanding that photos are recording something real in a way which is no longer true at all.

Yes, people played dark room and photoshop tricks but those were labor intensive and hard to make pass a detailed examination. What we have just seen is the equivalent of jumping from the age of archery to machine guns without much time for society to adjust and develop safeguards.

[adrianN]

When we jumped too machine guns we had WWI and people weren’t prepared either. That’s how technology usually works.

[acdha]

Yes, but you’re restating why I specified archery as the starting point: by WWI people had had multiple centuries to get used to firearms improving rapidly and changing ranged warfare from something requiring skilled warriors to something you could throw gobs of recently-recruited farm boys at. AI fakery has progressed at a much faster rate.

[saulpw]

WWI was one of the worst things that ever happened in all of history, it destroyed many millions of lives and scarred an entire generation of people across the entire world and led pretty directly to WWII and the Holocaust. I'm not sure "that's how technology usually works" is a good argument here.

[__loam]

Ironically it also led to Turing and modern computation. Some of the earliest computers were built to decode enigma and help develop the atom bomb as far as I know.