Almost all of us have been duped into believing a Photoshopped image is real.
The photo of a Buddha supposedly carved into a rock formation at the Ngyen Khag Taktsang Monastery in China is one example of a faked image that went viral.
The creator behind the Photoshop job prefers to remain anonymous, going simply by the Twitter handle Archistophanes, but he spoke recently to Gizmodo's Paleofuture.
Talking about how he first came up with the idea for the Buddha photo, he told Paleofuture, "I started to play with search entries: what was popular on Tumblr, or what images come up first on a Google image search."
The original photo of the tall rock formation in its natural state was on Tumblr under the hashtag #landscape, and the creator went from there.
"Monumental architecture or sculptures are also hugely popular so I glued two together," he said.
Archistophanes is part of a collective called Reality Cues, which has a Tumblr project called Graffiti Lab.
Even though the undoctored image of the monastery was already popular, people began passing around the Photoshopped version. Archistophanes found that the viral hits revealed some fascinating things about human nature.
"What interests me is how often someone can see an image and not realize that some change has transpired," Archistophanes said. "At some point the original has been swapped out and a new 'improved' version is in its place."
For the viral Buddha carving, Archistophanes discovered that people liked to pass around the photo as inspiration.
"Someone was defending that it could physically be built," he said. "[The person defending the authenticity of the monastery image] said something like: people can do great things when they get together to accomplish goals."
Two other popular creations that have more obvious changes are the Long Forgotten Temple of Lysistrata and the Han Solo in carbonite in a Frank Gehry building, both of which have been passed around online as real.
When Paleofuture's Matt Novak asked whether clearly Photoshopped pieces had been viral hits, the creator noted, "I like that you say 'clearly Photoshopped' because to me they are all clearly Photoshopped."
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