When Is a Photo Not a Photo? The Looming Specter of Artificially Generated Photographs

In 1984, when photographers were still using film, I began exploring the early use of computers to undetectably modify photographs. In an article in The New York Times Magazine I wrote that “in the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.” This was two years after National Geographic, at the dawn of the digital image revolution, had modified a… Read Full Article