Is that comedian Bill Hader or actor Arnold Schwarzenegger? The Hader/Schwarzenegger deepfake, left; the real Bill Hader, right.
- Reality-altering tools have existed almost as long as photography.
- In the last century and a half, there has been an array of tools developed to trick viewers into seeing things that aren't there.
- Old trick photographs look silly to us now, but deepfake videos are shockingly convincing.
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Using photos to trick viewers into falling for illusions has been as popular as the medium of photography itself.
While scalpels and glue were once the main tools of the trade, Adobe's landmark Photoshop software brought picture manipulation to the modern era - and made it available to the masses. Magazine covers and ads were no longer the only places where one could turn to for warped visions of reality. With the click of a mouse, anyone could vanish their most hated blemishes from pictures or add elements that were never there.
Now, AI has made image manipulation a part of daily life. Accessible phone apps can show us how we'd look 40 years in the future, while "deepfake" videos take reality-altering to its extreme: it grafts faces onto images and videos so convincingly, people who view them are sure they're portraying actual events.
Here are the biggest leaps image-manipulating technology has made in the last decades.
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