The latest skills and techniques in photo manipulation make it difficult to distinguish illusion from reality. Worse, these techniques are being combined with technologies that allow the same principles to be applied to live video images with hardly any delay. It used to take hours with an airbrush to pretty up those models, now a computer can automatically apply a mole-eraser filter and remove anything that might be a skin imperfection in moments. It becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the real from the fake. Real life examples include the famous darkened OJ photo, as well as countless doctored magazine covers, including a somewhat controversial cover of National Geographic where a ceremonial head covering was added to an image of a bareheaded tribal chieftain.
Some manipulations are obvious, such as the talking animals in Babe.
Others aren't so obvious. Instead, we will see a dozen or so extras digitized, diddled with and duplicated a few thousand times. We live in a worldwide society where most of us are captured on video tape every day by the stores at which we shop or the companies at which we work. On the other hand, any one of those video tapes could be manipulated by the people with the right tools and knowledge to show us performing any act whatsoever, even at places to which we have never been, or at times during which we were definitely somewhere else. So far even the state of the art can be identified if you know what to look for.