Fake Photos Alter Real Memories

Fascinating, and fully plausible, too.

What's scary is that it takes more patience than skill to alter a photograph now that there's such good software. Did the mayor really pose with all those bigwigs, like the pix in her office, or is she PhotoShopped in? Did my sister really get her picture taken with Rick Springfield? Was my mom ever that thin? Did my brother even go to Barcelona?

More interesting is that even though we all know photos can be altered pretty much undetectably, we still accept images as real and are willing to revise our actual memories of the events we witnessed to match the photographic evidence.

Maryn, who thinks the press is going to have to re-earn our trust after we learned photos widely distributed had been altered