I’m old enough to remember when Photoshop became a thing and everyone said it was the end of the world as we know it.
That we won’t be able to trust images ever again, that people would use it to mass produce misinformation and it would lead to abuse.
I can’t tell if that was a mad panic or if that’s exactly what happened though.
I remember that too, except it took actual talent to do so in those days. Back in the days, we had like one or two images the far-right made and claimed to be real. Now we have thousands if not millions.
From shopped to slop
Slopped*
#NeverSlop
Time to go back to commissioning portraits from painters who forage to make their own pigments.
Verb
retouch (third-person singular simple present retouches, present participle retouching, simple past and past participle retouched)
- (transitive) To improve something (especially a photograph), by adding or correcting details, or by removing flaws.
a. 1701 (date written), John Dryden, “Epistle the Fourteenth. To Sir Godfrey Kneller, Principal Painter to His Majesty.”, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Dryden, […], volume II, London: […] J[acob] and R[ichard] Tonson, […], published 1760, →OCLC, page 201:
For time ſhall with his ready pencil ſtand;
Retouch your figures with his ripening hand;
Mellow your colors, and imbrown the teint;
Add every grace, which time alone can grant;
To future ages ſhall your fame convey,
And give more beauties than he takes away.
I remember an article from the 90s that first mentioned ‘computer doctoring’ in terms of photo manipulation. Before Photoshop become well known, the practice was called doctoring.
Photos were ‘Airbrushed’ before that, more for removing blemishes or making models thinner.
Airbrushing was one technique. There were others.
And doctoring is almost as old as photography itself. The Tichborne case in France in the 19th century is one. They had some basic tricks to photographs at the time (most double or partial exposures) but they did count as manipulation.
The shadows on this post are all wrong.
“It was GIMPed”
TBH you cN usually tell a photoshop from an AI, but Adobe outlived its relevance regardless.
So people don’t know how to use language anymore?
Or is tech literacy so low that people don’t even understand the difference between an edited image, and some absurd slop generated bt a trash machine?
Yes
Imagine how stupid the average person is, and then consider that half of them are stupider
Really annoys me that people look at old shopped images or CGI videos and go “I think this is AI”.
I saw someone reposting this video and people were like “oh that’s got to be AI” but no, it’s a Blender video from 2021, guys.
It’s fucking sad and funny thinking about the (subscription) versions of Photoshop released in the last couple of years, ones where Adobe added AI-based tools.
MS paint still with a niche following
I miss the good honest deception of spending hours trying to make misinformation pieces for fun. Truly, people are too lazy to even hoax authentically anymore, truly a shame.
As ever, Jasc PaintShop Pro lies sad and forgotten :'(
Because Corel bought it up and ruined it.
BTW, those image macro memes with the Impact font? Originally they were made with Paint Shop Pro, as it had built-in support for text outlines. In Photoshop, you have to fiddle with it to get that thing working.

A co-worker recently asked which AI I used to make some drawings in a presentation. I made them all by hand in Inkscape, so I’m not sure if I should feel good or bad about the question.
It’s just awful these days. I was presenting the other day with some co-workers. One made a nice looking edit to a slide, but had some typos. I asked for the original since the slide was just a rendered image. The response I got was the prompt they used to generate the slide in copilot “give me an engaging slide using this information…”
I re-drew the damn thing in like 5 minutes myself, but jebus, this is what counts as work these days?
You should’ve kept the original slide and made sure to give them credit when presenting it: “and before we go to the next slide, I wanted to give a huge thank you to so-and-so for their contribution to this presentation!” *everybody claps*
It was someone in a higher position than I, and I’m 4 months in to the role. So…
I’m lucky to have colleagues that understand that doing things with AI, that are supposed to reach some audience, will feel low effort to said audience. Like, if I’m tryna sell someone my shit I better not half-ass advertising. Not to mention broken telephone game of me explaining stuff to AI for AI to explain it to potential clientele.
I’m in a relatively high up position, so the audience was the C level types. I find they tend to prefer the AI type responses, mine tend to be a bit information dense.
So, my workflow now is to draft, put it through AI then re-edit to remove the typical AI hallmarks.
I’ve watched my niece and nephews do their homework and since it’s all done online, they literally copypaste the question into chatgpt, then copypaste the answer.
This is what happens when you ditch pen and paper (there have also been studies showing that handwriting activates different parts of the brain that increases memory retention or something like that, too lazy to look it up). Anyway, we can look forward to gen alpha coworkers not knowing how to do anything if this is how they do their homework.
“My own.”
I’d have flipped tables.
My coworkers asked me to make a poster with AI, I made it with LibreOffice Draw instead.











