Your comment somehow just made me realize something: When we see/read news, we have to trust the one who’s telling them to us. Since we weren’t there in person to see it with our own eyes. Therefore, it’s always about a “chain of trust”.

This is true no matter whether photos can be manipulated or not. People have been able to lie since humanity exists. Nothing has really changed. Photography, just like globalization, has only brought everything closer together, making it easier to have a more direct, straightforward relationship to other people and events. With the beginning of AI, this distance between you and an event is going to increase a bit, but the core mechanics are still similar.

I kind of wonder, how do we really know that something is true? Do atoms actually exist? What if we’re being lied to by our authorities. You say “of course not”. But what if? I mean, if we blindly trust authorities, we end up like the republicans, who believe everything that fox news tells them. How, then, do we discern truth?