Who you gonna believe? Me or your own lying AIs?

ABOUT THE IMAGES: The AI program Midjourney doesn’t just create pictures. It can analyze an image and provide a prompt — or descriptive language — that could have been used to create it. We selected some of the most iconic photographs of the last century and asked it to do just that. We then fed the resulting prompts back into Midjourney. The images you see in this story, which took just seconds to generate, are the result.

But wait! Can you tell the real from the fake? Take our quiz before you read.

Call it The Tale of Two Selfies.

Shortly after two members of the Indian wrestling team were arrested in New Delhi while protesting alleged sexual harassment by the president of the national wrestling federation, two nearly identical photos of the duo began circulating online.

Both showed the two women inside a police van among officers and other members of their team. But in one they looked glum. In the other, they were beaming gleefully — as if the arrest had been nothing more than a charade.

For hours, the picture of the smiling wrestlers zipped across social media, reposted by supporters of the federation president, even as journalists, fact-checkers and the two women derided it as fake. It was only much later that an analysis comparing their smiles to earlier photos proved the grins were not genuine. They had been added afterward, most likely by free, off-the-shelf software such as FaceApp, which uses artificial intelligence to digitally manipulate images.

Stories like this one point to a rapidly approaching future in which nothing can be trusted to be as it seems. AI-generated images, video and audio are already being deployed in election campaigns. These include fake pictures of former U.S. President Donald Trump hugging and kissing the country’s top COVID adviser Anthony Fauci; a video in Poland mixing real footage of right-wing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki with AI-generated clips of his voice; and a deepfake “recording” of the British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer throwing a fit.

While these were all quickly disclosed or debunked, they won’t be the last, and those that are coming will be ever harder to spot. As AI tools improve, the real will become indistinguishable from the fictional, fueling political disinformation and undermining efforts to authenticate everything from campaign gaffes to distant war crimes. The phrase “photographic evidence” risks becoming a relic of an ancient age.