It’s true: even if AI is a lot easier to use than Photoshop, the latter was still a technological revolution that forced people to reckon with a whole new world of fakery. But Photoshop and other pre-AI editing tools did create social problems that persist to this day and still cause meaningful harm. The ability to digitally retouch photographs on magazines and billboards promoted impossible beauty standards for both men and women, with the latter disproportionately impacted. In 2003, for instance, a then-27-year-old Kate Winslet was unknowingly slimmed down on the cover of GQ — and the British magazine’s editor, Dylan Jones, justified it by saying her appearance had been altered “no more than any other cover star.”
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