>But, when they were alive, they had enough experience of the real world that they would be suspicious of bandages worn outside of clothes, the printed document wrapped around the arm, and the gauze that rather than wrapping fully around the head seamless merges into the forehead.

Would they have noticed them at the quick glance that this image invites? Assume an astute person but with media literacy based on:

* newspapers (where fake photos are possible but more primitive), and

* TV (where the image is moving and appears on the screen only for you to notice it, but not to examine it closely).

* also possibly from the tiny screen of a janky smartphone mandatorily plugged into the dark forest of social media.

At a glance, this hypothetical person would likely see something like "a guy was hurt in a war, he is now miserable in a hospital, here he is, _there is no other information in this picture_, read on". And then they are more likely to pay a little more attention to the text, because they just saw an image containing things that prime them for experiencing compassion.

Disregarding that experience becomes outdated, and the target audience for propaganda also includes inexperienced people and those who never developed good thinking habits in the first place, elderly people are also more likely to have degraded senses, and may be less interested in playing "spot the 10 differences" than a young digital native absolutely fascinated with this fun new technological development.

I for one spotted none of the things that were wrong with the photo, even though some of them were really obvious. But I didn't look twice until seeing them pointed out in the replies. And even then, I though "maybe it's a scratch that only takes a large band aid and not a full bandage, what the hell do I know about bandaging a head anyway" (defaulting to trusting the image and excusing inconsistencies). And, since, the context was being already established by the poster so I didn't even look twice. Besides, now that many camera phones have "AI smoothing filters", that blurs the boundary even more, making real photos look AI generated. The overall "AI smoothness" that I noticed about the image (where it's the "notional" resolution that is degraded, not the rasterization) might be completely lost on people who are visually impaired, or just don't stay up to date with the novelties of image processing.

So I fall back to the same heuristic that your grandparents, bless them, probably also used: if it's on the news, it's somewhat fake by definition. And how much attention you should pay to it depends on how much your interests align with those of whoever's paying for you to see it.

Ofc, becoming stuck in a local optimum bubble of fake perceptions that confirm each other, and gaining a "political identity", is nothing new, either. Our generation just got blindsided by the idea that computers and the Internet would somehow make this fuckery less necessary. Can't wait to see what scams would target me when I'm old but my elderly parents did fall for a fake phone bill because the guy brought it in person - once again, no AI necessary, neither is there a viable way for AI to help with this problem. (AI doorbells recognizing scammers I guess? but that can turn real dystopic real fast.)