Can You Trust What You See? History Says..Maybe Not.


Hello, Reader!

OpenAI just made it easy to create fake videos that look completely real.

When the Sora app launched last week, users flooded social media with parody AI-generated clips depicting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shoplifting, Jesus cracking jokes at the Last Supper, and Ronald McDonald fleeing police.

Within days, the app topped Apple's App Store and sparked a firestorm over copyright theft, deepfakes, and the death of visual truth.

If video can be fabricated with a few keystrokes, can we ever trust what we see again?
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History tells us we never could.

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πŸ–ΌοΈ The Big Picture

What's Happening: OpenAI released Sora, an AI video generator that creates hyperrealistic clips from text prompts, complete with synchronized audio (in some demos). Users quickly filled the app with copyrighted characters and real people's likenesses, sparking outrage from Hollywood studios and deepfake experts. [1]

⚠️ Why It Matters: Using Sora's "cameo" features, some users experimented with inserting likenesses of themselves and friends into AI videos, blurring the line between reality and fabrication. Experts warn that this technology could accelerate scams, misinformation, and election-related disinformation, primarily because Sora videos can circulate beyond the app without consistent watermarking. [2]

πŸ“œ What History Reveals: Americans have wrestled with visual deception and propaganda since before independence. The tools change, but the tactics--and our vulnerabilities--remain remarkably consistent.

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πŸ” Historical Deep Dive

The Miraculous Machine

In August 1839, news arrived in the United States that a Frenchman named Louis-Jacques-MandΓ© Daguerre had invented something extraordinary: a process that could capture reality itself.

Within weeks, instructions for the daguerreotype process reached New York aboard a ship from Europe. Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, immediately recognized its potential. Morse learned this early photographic technique directly from Daguerre and began teaching it to others in the United States, including a young entrepreneur named Mathew Brady. [3]
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Americans went wild for this new technology. By summer 1840, daguerrotype studios had opened across the Northeast. By 1850, New York City had more than 70 studios. By 1853, American photographers produced an estimated three million daguerrotypes each year.

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What made daguerrotypes so revolutionary?

They weren't paintings or sketches created by an artist with an artist's interpretation of their subject. They were mechanical, chemical, seemingly objective records of reality.

Americans believed the camera captured "truthful likeness." And many Americans saved entire day's wages to obtain an exact image of themselves or their loved ones. [4]

Daguerrotype technology seemed almost magical. A daguerrotype was made with a silvered copper plate polished to a mirror finish. The daguerrotype maker treated this plate with light-sensitive chemicals and then exposed the plate to light in a camera. The resulting images contained extraordinary detail and three-dimensionality. When viewed through a magnifying glass, a viewer could see even more detail. For example, a daguerrotype of a street scene might capture perfectly legible street signs located a whole block away from the subject. [5]

The process of daguerreotyping gave way to photography in 1851 with the development of glass-type negatives and albumen paper that allowed the negatives to be reproduced on paper.

For the first time in history, ordinary people could possess permanent, detailed images of themselves and their families. For the first time, reality could be captured and preserved.

Most people believed photography portrayed the truth, at least initially.

When Photography Went to War

On July 6, 1863, photographer Alexander Gardner stood in a rocky area of the Gettysburg battlefield known as Devil's Den. Four days before, Devil's Den saw heavy fighting between American Union and Confederate soldiers. In total, the Battle of Gettysburg produced 51,000 casualties--23,000 Union and 28,000 Confederate troops.

As he trekked around this area of the battlefield, Gardner found a dead Confederate soldier lying in an open area. The deceased's position wasn't dramatic enough. So Gardner and his assistant carried the body 40 yards to a spot near a large boulder and positioned it carefully so the soldier's head faced the camera. They also propped a rifle against a nearby rock.

Then they took their photographs.

Gardner titled his photo "Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter," and wrote a moving caption describing how the soldier must have remembered his family before taking his last breath. [6]

This image became one of the most famous photographs of the Civil War. But there is a problem with it: it was staged.

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​Mathew Brady's Brand: The First Content Aggregator

Alexander Gardner worked for Mathew Brady, often called the "Father of Photojournalism." But Brady operated less as a photographer and more as the head of a media empire.

Brady had studied daguerreotype with Samuel Morse. He stood out among his fellow photographers by fusing the artistry of photography with entrepreneurship.

Before the outbreak of the Civil War, Brady pioneered the field of celebrity portraits, operating studios in New York City and Washington, D.C., where he took daguerreotypes of public figures like Daniel Webster, Edgar Allan Poe, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Brady marketed relentlessly. He mounted his photographs in branded frames, opened exhibitions of his work in elegant galleries, and published catalogs of his work that turned portraits into a type of cultural currency.
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His Civil War project, Brady's Photographic Views of the War, was groundbreaking. Brady rarely visited battlefields himself. Instead, he financed teams of photographers, such as Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, to capture images across the war's various battlefields. These photographers sent negatives back to Brady's New York studio, where his team developed, edited, captioned, and branded them all "Photo by Brady" or "Brady & Co." regardless of who took the image.

In many ways, Brady's work was an early version of content aggregation. He created, collected, and curated images, edited them with stylistic cuts and captions, and branded them all for maximum credibility and impact. Brady's name became synonymous with authentic war photography. Viewers may not have known who stood behind the camera, but they knew they trusted Brady's brand. [7]

Shocking Display of War

In October 1862, Mathew Brady shocked the United States when he displayed photographs of battlefield corpses at Antietam.
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The exhibition, "The Dead of Antietam," featured images by Alexander Gardner and James Gibson. It was the first time most Americans saw the carnage of the war. The New York Times wrote that Brady had brought "home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war." [8]

Americans believed that Brady & Co's images showed them the unfiltered truth of the Civil War. In fact, they were actually viewing carefully curated storytelling.

Many Forms of Photographic Manipulation

Civil War photographers didn't just move bodies; they manipulated images in several ways:
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​Rearranging Scenes: Gardner's staged sharpshooter image is the most famous example, but photographers routinely repositioned objects, weapons, and even corpses to create more compelling photographic compositions.

Selective Framing: Photographers chose what to include and what to exclude in their photographs. Camp scenes might emphasize order and heroism while hiding the messy realities of camp life, like disease, desertion, and demoralization. A careful crop could transform a mundane battlefield into an iconic scene of sacrifice.

Technical Enhancement: Studio technicians sometimes retouched prints, enhanced skies, added smoke, or combined multiple negatives to overcome the limitations of early photographic technology. Their goal wasn't always to deceive; sometimes they enhanced photographs simply to create clearer images of a print.

Captions and Context: Perhaps most powerfully, Brady's team wrote evocative captions and arranged exhibitions to elicit specific emotional responses. Every photograph's impact depended on curatorial choices: what to show, what to hide, and what story to tell.

The photographers weren't necessarily trying to lie. They were trying to convey the emotional truths--the horror, sacrifice, and humanity of the war. Sometimes this meant sacrificing factual precision.

Commercial Incentives: Brady and Gardner ran businesses. Dramatic images sold better than mundane ones. Brady spent over $100,000 (roughly $2 million today) on his Civil War documentation, expecting the U.S. government to purchase the collection. When it didn't, he faced bankruptcy. [9]
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The Lesson We Forget

Art has never been neutral. The portraits and images made about the American Revolution were often meant to flatter the Founders and portray heroic scenes.

The photographs taken by Brady, Gardner, and their colleagues/competitors to document and portray the Civil War were likewise shaped by artistic and business choices: how to frame the image, how to stage it, the time of day it was taken, and its presentation were choices the photographers made. Even when the photographers didn't move bodies or enhance skies, they chose where to point their cameras and when to press the shutter.

We've forgotten this important lesson. So when the television arrived, we believed our new moving pictures couldn't lie. But just as with photographs, video can be edited and adapted by the creator.

Now, OpenAI and other companies have made video fabrication as easy as typing a sentence.

In 1863, Alexander Gardner and his assistant moved a soldier's body 40 yards and created a fabricated image that has since helped shape our public memory of the Battle of Gettysburg.

With OpenAI's Sora app, anyone can create an entirely fabricated video in seconds.

The technology of image-making has changed. But do we have a willingness to deeply consider whether what we see is real or fake?

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πŸ’¬ Final Thought

History tells us who we are and how we came to be who we are.

Can a republic survive when its citizens are bombarded with unreliable images and information? Can a democracy function when images and words can be manipulated to serve partisan ends?

Two and half centuries later, the United States and its people are still testing these questions.

Sora doesn't create new problems; it amplifies old ones.

Benjamin Franklin used images like his iconic "Join or Die" snake to build a nation. John Trumbull used heroic paintings to unite the American people. And Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner used photographs to help their fellow Americans see and understand the realities of their nation's Civil War.

Today, Americans might use AI-generated videos to achieve the same effects, or they may use them to tear down our democratic republic.

The question isn't whether the technology exists; it's whether we'll develop better civic habits of skepticism, verification, and critical thinking to help us tell fact from fiction.

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🎧 Go Deeper

Investigate the early American world of misinformation with these episodes of Ben Franklin's World:

Misinformation Nation​
​Episode 375​
Discover how the politics of truth shaped the United States' founding by investigating the history of the press and its involvement with misinformation in Revolutionary America.

Revolutionary Networks​
​Episode 243​
Explore how American revolutionaries developed and spread their ideas and coordinated their actions through newspapers and print networks.

The Common Cause​
​Episode 144​
Investigate how revolutionaries used the press to unite the American people during the Revolution, often through propaganda and fear-based messaging.

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πŸ’¬ What Do You Think?

For 160 years, "seeing was believing." Now that realistic video can be so easily fabricated with a text prompt, what becomes our standard for truth--and who's responsible for maintaining it?

πŸ“© Hit Reply to share your thoughts.​

Have a great weekend,
​Liz Covart​
Host, Ben Franklin’s World​

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P.S. Interesting Family Connection

The American Civil War always seems so modern to the American Revolutionary Era I study. But I admit the research for this issue fascinated me.

Family lore claims we are related to Mathew B. Brady. No documentary evidence that I've seen exists for this, but the photographic evidence is compelling: The Brady men all share distinctive noses and ears that run through my maternal line.

Coincidentally, I'm also working in media, trying to provide credible information. Like Brady, historians make choices that shape how we view reality.

For example, I could have used John Trumbull's paintings and what he chose to include and exclude from his images of the Revolutionary War. Instead, I decided to highlight Civil War photography because I thought it made a stronger case that Americans have always confronted falseness in images we take for fact.

The past happened, history is made.

Historians make choices about what evidence to examine, how to interpret it, and what stories they tell. Even when we try to be objective, we're influenced by our present.

There's a smart saying: A good history book will tell you as much about the period it studies as it does about the period it was written in.

Be discerning. Check the evidence to see who historians cite, where their evidence comes from, and who they choose not to cite. Knowledge creation is never neutral, even we try.

I haven't forgotten your requests for information about how to spot fake information and images. Consider this newsletter the start of my response.
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πŸ“ End Notes

[1] Ashley Capoot, "OpenAI's invite-only video generation app Sora tops Apple's App Store," CNBC, October 3, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/03/openai-sora-apple-app-store.html; Gerrit De Vynck and Drew Harwell, "Everything is fake on Silicon Valley's hottest new social network," The Washington Post, October 2, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/02/sora-openai-video-face-fake/; "Sora 2 is here," OpenAI, September 30, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://openai.com/index/sora-2/; "Motion Picture Association Blasts OpenAI Over Sora 2 Video Copyright Opt-Outs," Variety, October 7, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://variety.com/2025/film/news/motion-picture-association-openai-sora-2-copyright-1236541775/.

[2] Carl Franzen, "OpenAI debuts Sora 2 AI video generator app with sound and self-insertion cameos, API coming soon," VentureBeat, September 30, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-debuts-sora-2-ai-video-generator-app-with-sound-and-self-insertion/; Sam Sabin, "AI video apps are a scammer's goldmine," Axios, October 7, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.axios.com/2025/10/07/openai-sora-scammers-deepfakes.

[3] Malcolm Daniel, "Daguerre (1787-1851) and the Invention of Photography," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/daguerre-1787-1851-and-the-invention-of-photography; "The Daguerrotype Medium," Library of Congress, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/collections/daguerreotypes/articles-and-essays/the-daguerreotype-medium; "Daguerrotype Process: 1840-1860s," Historic New Orleans Collection, accessed October 9, 2025, https://hnoc.org/virtual-exhibitions/from_daguerreotype_to_digital/daguerreotype-process; "The Daguerrian Era and Early American Photography on Paper, 1839-1860," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 1, 2004, accssed October 9, 2025, https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-daguerreian-era-and-early-american-photography-on-paper-1839-1860.

[4] "Daguerrotype Process: 1840-1860s," Historic New Orleans Collection, accessed October 9, 2025, https://hnoc.org/virtual-exhibitions/from_daguerreotype_to_digital/daguerreotype-process; "Daguerrotype," Wikipedia, accessed October 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype.

[5] "Daguerrotype Process: 1840-1860s," Historic New Orleans Collection, accessed October 9, 2025, https://hnoc.org/virtual-exhibitions/from_daguerreotype_to_digital/daguerreotype-process; Georgen Charnes, "Daguerreotypes: The First Photographs," Nantucket Historical Association, Summer 2004, accessed October 9, 2025, https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/daguerreotypes-first-photographs/.

[6] "Pennsylvania, Gettysburg. The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter," July 1863, U.S. National Archives, accessed October 9, 2025, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/533315; "Alexander Gardner, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, from Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War," 1865, MoMA, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/86695; "Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter," Wikipedia, accessed October 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_of_a_Rebel_Sharpshooter,

[7] "Mathew Brady: Biographical Note," Library of Congress, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-war-glass-negatives/articles-and-essays/mathew-brady-biographical-note/; "Mathew Brady," American Battlefield Trust, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/mathew-brady; "Mathew Brady," Wikipedia, accessed October 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathew_Brady.

[8] "Brady's Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam," The New York Times, October 20, 1862, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/1862/10/20/archives/bradys-photographs-pictures-of-the-dead-at-antietam.html; "Brady's Album Gallery," Library of Congress, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005688698/.

[9] "Alexander Gardner, Mathew Brady, and Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Library of Congress, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/static/collections/civil-war-glass-negatives/articles-and-essays/does-the-camera-ever-lie/introduction.html; "Alexander Gardner, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, from Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War," 1865, MoMA, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/8669; "Mathew Brady," Wikipedia, accessed October 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathew_Brady.

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πŸ“– Further Reading

Joseph Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).

Cindy L. Otis, True or False: A CIA Analyst's Guide to Spotting Fake News, (New York: Square Fish, 2022).

Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2019).

Nicholas J.C. Pistor, Shooting Lincoln: Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Race to Photograph the Story of the Century, (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017).

Jordan E. Taylor, Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).


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