My Grandpa's old photo album hit different after I saw a deepfake demo

I was over at my parents house cleaning out the attic last weekend and found this photo album from my grandpa's army days in the 1940s. There were these group shots of him with his buddies, all young guys smiling in their uniforms. Then I remembered watching a YouTube video a few days earlier where some guy swapped faces onto old historical footage, and it looked flawless. It hit me hard that I have no way to be absolutely sure those photos are real. I mean, I trust my grandpa, but what if someone generations from now finds this album and thinks it was all faked? The technology is moving so fast that even something as solid as a black and white photo feels shaky now. Has anyone else had that weird feeling where something once sacred for memory now feels fragile?

3 comments

3 Comments

susan_adams15d ago

My cousin actually did something smart with our grandma's old photos that helped me get past this exact feeling. She took a bunch of them and got them digitized and then printed out on actual photo paper with a note on the back saying when and where they were taken, plus who was in them. She also scanned all the handwriting my grandma left on the backs of the photos and added that as part of the file. It gave me something solid to hold onto, like the physical stuff still matters even if the tech to fake it gets crazy good. I figure if someone finds those in 50 years they'll at least have a clear chain of who made them and why.

xena_bailey1815d ago

Heard a conservator say provenance matters more than the physical object ever did.

troy_price15d ago

The second I saw that deepfake demo my whole brain just short circuited. I have this old box of photos from my aunt who was a nurse in the 50s and I used to look at them like they were holy relics. Now I catch myself staring at the grain and wondering if it's actual film grain or some kind of generated texture. Even her handwriting on the back of the pictures feels suspect now and that's insane because I know she wrote those notes herself. It's like the ground just got a little less solid under my feet.