I can't tell if a photo is real

My mother sent me a picture of a whale in a hotel pool. She wants to know if we should drive over. — Son, 2024

In 1917 two cousins in Yorkshire took pictures of cutout fairies stuck up on hatpins. Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented the most observant detective in fiction, believed them. Where a pin poked through a gnome's belly, he saw a belly button. Now a fake takes one typed sentence. Some AI tools hide a label in the picture saying how it was made, but the social apps often strip it off or never show it. The hatpin, at least, you could see.

For now: search for other photos of the same moment, or a news report about it.

The full file

Conan Doyle didn't keep it to himself. In 1920 he put the photos in The Strand Magazine under the headline "Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event." He wrote that they were either that or "the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public." It wasn't elaborate.

The fakes move faster now. On May 22, 2023, a picture that looked AI-made, of an explosion near the Pentagon, spread on Twitter through blue-check accounts, one of them posing as tied to Bloomberg. The Dow dropped about 80 points in four minutes. The fire department and the Pentagon's police said nothing had happened.

That March, millions saw Pope Francis in a big white puffer coat. A 31-year-old construction worker from the Chicago area made it with an AI tool called Midjourney. He said he was "just blown away." The cousins at least had to cut out their fairies.

Relates to No. 09100.