The line between a completely made-up depiction and a real one isn't necessarily the important one. The photos of Hillary Clinton were real enough, but carefully selected and post-processed to make her look as unsympathetic as possible.

Does a photo of a candidate scowling or sneering constitute a genuine portrayal of their appearance and personality? If so, why not make that scowl or sneer just a bit more menacing or disgusting, if your publication is in the opponent's corner?

A better example might be this one: http://hoaxes.org/photo_database/image/darkened_mug_shot/

Imagine what it's going to be like when the tools are good enough to do more than just airbrush or darken a static image, but not yet good enough to create entire "fake news" segments from scratch. It's absurd to think that ML-based tools won't be used to turn a real audio or video recording into something different that you and I will incorrectly assume is still real.

That's when things are going to get scary. I'm sure this tech is coming soon to an election near you.

Alright, I did remember the incident off the top of my head, I abide by your weird rules.

1) The photos are fake, I did not say the Quartz was the source of the information that the photos are fake, I was showing the photos. Are you suggesting the photos are real? They are not real.

2) I was attempting to have this conversation without being political. Fine - I consider the election of Donald Trump to be a negative thing, and I consider the evil tactics of lying and cheating to get him to be more likely to be elected to also be negative consequences. (If you don't consider these to be negative consequences, then fine - but surely you understand that some people do, and that's not what we're here to discuss.)

And for the magazine photos - I felt sad. So do millions of other people every day. That is also a negative consequence. (Again, if you disagree that this is a negative consequence, then fine - but lots of us think it is a bad thing.)