The New Scientist article on the Rijksmuseum's FAKE! Early Photo Collages and Photomontages exhibition rightly highlights that viral fakes like the 2023 AI-generated Pope Francis in a puffer jacket are not a 21st-century invention. It showcases whimsical early 1900s examples: W.H. Martin's 1908 composite of an impossibly large ear of corn created through cut-and-paste photography, a pre-1908 postcard imagining flying cars over New York, a wheelbarrow hauling a gigantic head, and geese towering over their owners on the way to market. These were produced by photographing elements separately, assembling them, and re-photographing the result - techniques documented since around 1860, shortly after photography's popularization.

However, the coverage misses critical context by emphasizing novelty and commercial amusement while downplaying the direct evolutionary line to sophisticated propaganda. The exhibition traces manipulation up to World War II, a period when the same methods shifted from postcards to weapons of ideological warfare. What original reporting overlooks is how photomontage became central to both satire and state deception. John Heartfield's searing anti-Nazi collages in the 1930s German magazine AIZ used precise cut-and-paste techniques to depict Hitler as a puppet or devourer of gold - images that exposed fascism more powerfully than text alone could. Similarly, as detailed in David King's 1997 book 'The Commissar Vanishes,' Soviet authorities systematically altered photographs to erase purged officials like Trotsky from historical records with Stalin, fundamentally rewriting visual history.

Synthesizing the Rijksmuseum exhibition with King's archival analysis and a 2012 Atlantic piece on pre-Photoshop manipulation reveals consistent patterns across eras. Whenever a new visual medium emerges - wet-plate photography in the 19th century, digital tools in the late 20th, generative AI today - it is rapidly exploited to shape narratives because images carry an assumed evidentiary power that text lacks. The original coverage gets the timeline right but fails to connect these 'startling images' to today's disinformation crisis. Coverage of modern deepfakes often presents them as a technological breaking point, ignoring that public susceptibility to visual falsehoods stems from deep cognitive biases, not merely the tools. Psychological research on media credibility, though limited by small Western-centric samples and lab-based methodologies that may not reflect real-world social media consumption, consistently shows viewers grant higher trust to photographic evidence even when warned of potential manipulation.

This historical lens, often missing from tech-focused reporting, supplies essential perspective: fake news and propaganda are not aberrations of the digital age but persistent features of human communication. The delight in gargantuan farm produce postcards parallels today's shareable AI curiosities, while the darker political montages foreshadow coordinated influence campaigns. Solutions must therefore extend beyond detection algorithms to widespread visual literacy education. The Rijksmuseum show doesn't just display century-old tricks; it demonstrates that without understanding these recurring patterns, we remain doomed to repeat them as technology advances.