The Camera Was the First Deepfake
We say AI-generated people are fake. But what makes a photograph real?
A camera doesn’t preserve truth—it translates it. It bends light, flattens depth, and freezes a moment that vanishes the instant the shutter closes. “The camera adds ten pounds” isn’t a joke; it’s a confession. The machine that built our modern idea of realism has always lied a little. We just got used to the lie.
Photography was the first technology that simulated reality at scale. It startled the 19th century as much as AI startles us now. Painters feared extinction; philosophers worried we’d lose touch with the “aura” of the original.
But the camera became our new oracle of truth. The photograph wasn’t real. It just became the reality we chose to believe.
The simulation deepened from there. Film, television, and digital video re-engineered our sense of what’s real. Actors look taller on screen than in person; anchors are slimmer; voices are equalized; color and light are manipulated. Nobody calls these distortions “misinformation.” We accept them as style.
AI now steps onto the same stage, doing what cameras have always done: turning perception into pixels. Yet suddenly, people panic. Deepfakes. Fake humans. Synthetic reality. We talk as if the world were pure before the algorithm arrived. But every medium reshapes its subject. AI is simply more honest about it.
The discomfort isn’t that AI distorts reality. It’s that it exposes how much of our reality was always distorted. Photography industrialized the image. Film emotionalized it. Television monetized it. Social media personalized it. AI just automates it.
When a model creates a human face that never existed, it’s not inventing fakery—it’s industrializing imagination. The line between representation and reality didn’t break this decade—it broke the moment someone first called a photograph ‘proof.’
So maybe the question isn’t whether AI images are real or fake. It’s why we keep pretending photography ever was either. We’ve spent a century calling our favorite distortions truth. AI isn’t ending that illusion. It’s just holding up a better mirror.