The last 200 years or so were a brief, glorious blip in history when we could use recorded media – photographs, audio, videos – as evidence or proof of anything. Barely a blink of an eye, relative to the full history of civilization. Nice while it lasted, guess it’s over now.
@snarfed.org Lying with photographs isn’t new; Stalin raised it to a high art in the 1930s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Commissar_Vanishes It wouldn’t even be accurate to say that such lying was just recently democratised, as Photoshop has been part of the photographer’s toolkit for the last 2 decades. All the latest generative models have done is dropped the barriers to lying with images to zero.