At a time when suspicion of manipulated media has reached a new pitch of concern, the Princess of Wales photo furore underlines the sensitivity around image doctoring. Catherine was the subject of an image editing row in 2011 when Grazia adapted a photo of her on her wedding day – but that was before breakthroughs in artificial intelligence put everyone on edge. There has been a deluge of AI-generated deepfakes in recent years, from a video of Volodymyr Zelenskiy telling his soldiers to surrender, to explicit images of Taylor Swift. Historical examples of image manipulation can be clunky – from Argentine footballers clutching handbags to Stalin's missing underlings – but there is now an alarming credibility to AI-generated content. Catherine's attempts to adjust a family photo, amid frenzied social media speculation about her wellbeing, have run straight into widespread concerns about trust in images, text and audio in a year when half the world is going to the polls.