Opinion: Photographs have always been manipulated. Will AI make things worse?

Greater literacy will not only enhance creativity and temper fake-news paranoia, it will also make it harder to fool people with AI. — Image by topntp26 on Freepik

My craft has been unfairly maligned. As a graphic designer, I toy with images to illuminate and distill information, to evoke, represent. After Photoshop became popular in the ‘90s, it was common to see articles blaming the software for destroying trust in the media, for anorexia, for imposing beauty standards — for the end of truth.

But people have been editing photographic images, painting over them, cutting, pasting and doctoring for almost two centuries. Something is different now. Using techniques from AI — artificial intelligence — photographs can be manipulated without creators understanding how it happens.