A Pop Photo April Fool's Prank That Might Have Gone Too Far, Updated with AI

 It was 20 years ago today…April Fool’s day, 2004.

I was the managing editor of Popular Photography magazine, and along with my editor, John Owens, had an idea for a prank to pull on our readers in our April issue. It was a parody pf one of our regular features, “The Fix”, in which we would use Photoshop to demonstrate how to improve imperfect reader-submitted photos.

This time, though, we chose three iconic, historic images, and pretended they sucked, and “improved” them. 

Our wanton destruction of one of those images generated hundreds of letters. The photo was "Migrant Mother" by Dorothea Lange. It is one of the most poignant photos ever taken, but we wanted to pretend to be mindless Photoshop robots and fundementally change/ruin the picture. For laughs. And a message/commentary about overuse of new tech.

We roped in our resident Photoshop wiz, Debbie Grossman (who would go on to work for Adobe), to make our twisted plan a reality. We got my assistant to model a nice shirt in the same pose as the migrant mother because she had a similar body type. Under John and my directions, as we giggled like kids, Debbie turned Florence Owens’s frown into a smile, smoothed out her worried brow, got rid of the kids, bobbed her head, and turned her into a worry-free soccer mom.

The whole process took four hours, and four staff members’ involvement. Here's how it came out:

Left: Migrant Mother, by Dorothea Lange. Public Domain photo courtesy Library of Congress. Right: Popular Photography April Fool's Prank, over-manipulated with Photoshop.

We expected, and got, letters: Hundreds of rants, hate mail, and excommunication threats. Stuff like: “downright heresy,” “disrespectful and ugly,” and “I can’t believe you’d stoop so low.” Of course when I responded that it was an April fool’s joke, most folks responded with: “Wow, you really had me going” and “Is that a big laugh I hear coming from Dorothea’s grave?”

A few readers were still pissed, and demand to cancel their subscriptions.

The whole incident has been recorded for posterity in the Museum of Hoaxes.

Flash-Forward: Meet Generative Fill

A lot has been written in the past year since Adobe incorporated Generative Fill into Photoshop. Yes, Photoshop now has AI-based tools. So, just as we did 20 years ago to show how new technology could be abused, I recently decided to try it again using the latest implements of photographic destruction.

I downloaded Migrant Mother from the Library of Congress. I did the same thing as we did at Pop Photo 20 years ago to “ruin” the photo, using generative fill prompts, generously.

This time, it took ten minutes, without anyone's help. I even changed the background more obviously. And it looks like this:

Same photo as above, revisited in 2024 and manipulated using Photoshop's Generative Fill tool.

May Florence and Dorothea forgive me.

And I promise: while this is simply a revival of an old April Fool’s prank, we’re seeing historic photos being altered by AI without being identified as such. 

In unethical hands, AI can be used to erase history.

And that’s no joke.