This is not a blog post I enjoy writing. I hate to criticize Cher fans or fans of anything actually. It seems so unfriendly. And we’re all in the same rickety boat here. But sometimes you have to talk about hard things.

I notice a fission forming between older fans and younger fans. And it’s going to be an issue with all fan bases before long, from Phyllis Diller fans to Madonna fans to Metallica fans.

Photos like the one below have been appearing on social Cher fan accounts over the last year or so:

It was attributed to Richard Avedon. But it’s a fake. It’s mimicking a series of photos Avedon took that ended up in Vogue and as the cover of Cher’s 1974 album Dark Lady.

Some A.I. Cher photos are so ridiculously not real, they’re almost funny. But these that replicate actual photo sessions are more concerning fakes because they confuse a fan’s idea of a real photograph Cher actually had taken and a deep fake.

Now if you are an older fan, one who has been staring at photos of Cher your whole life or maybe you are an expert in the outtakes of this particular photo session, seeing a photo like this will trigger cognitive dissonance. Is this really a lost outtake? What’s off with her arms there? Is that her real mouth? You can pick up on things that look “off” if you have more experience looking at Cher’s 1970s photos before this A.I. mess.

For this single photo I went to one of the Cher experts I know, Cher scholar Bruce who has seen the original contact sheet from this session. He agreed that the arms do not look like Cher arms here and the mouth is not a Cher mouth. He also said that Cher did two sessions with this dress. One was with a black cat with her hair pulled back and the other was with a black and white cat with her hair long and free. So the mashup of the black cat and the hair down is off as well.

This is an observable fake, but before long, A.I. will get better and smarter and come up with fakes where the arms and mouth do look like Cher’s and then only entertainment archaeologists or those who were there, people who “lived through it” will know the difference. And then eventually those people too will be gone and it will be a photo free-for-all.

I’ve seen fans point out A.I. fakes on social media and the publishers of those fakes responding with irritation. It’s not that they seem bothered by being fooled, but by being told they were fooled. There’s a “who cares” attitude among some younger fans. And I’ve seen older fans who’ve simply given up trying to keep the record straight. Already. And we’re only a year into this shit.

I think inexperienced fans get upset for two reasons:

First, people are not using their critical thinking skillz. (Look around you!) Social media and technology have eroded our thinking skills and then some of us are just lazy as a default-setting.

Secondly, people have stopped trusting expertise. There are two reasons for this. One, we all want to be the expert and are offended by the idea we’re not. Two, fascists want to lie so they throw shade on expertise (all the way back to saying “your grade school teacher was lying to you!”).

I can’t help but be reminded of Holocaust survivors here. Yes, I’m gonna take this back to the Holocaust. Everyone clutch their pearls.

There are already bad actors out there gaslighting survivors of all sorts of things, but particularly antisemitic, bad actors trafficking the idea that the Holocaust never happened. And as soon as all the Holocaust survivors pass away, these same bad actors will feel even more emboldened and they will gain traction with those who don’t know the difference between lies and the truth. They will more easily convince people it was just a story. And there will be no witnesses left.

In this situation, people in the future will not know who or what to trust and those people with lazy as a default-setting will trust any “strong man” who comes along. Fascism will gain even more traction to perpetuate even more atrocities. We’re actually living through it right now.

Deep fakes, even if they’re just photos of celebrities, encourage lies, especially in an environment of “who cares.”

Somebody either created this image for fun and it’s now fallen out of context or it was created in bad faith. Look around you! We’re already shooting each other in the streets over what is a lie and what is the truth.

And we’re all in trouble if you don’t care about the difference between lies and the truth…for all things great and small.

Here are some of the real things. The album cover (look at that mouth!):

One of the poster designs:

FromĀ Vogue:

Bruce also mentioned showing respect for the original artists “who put so much energy into creating an image” including the photographer, the make-up artist, the fashion designer and Cher herself. “A.I. takes away in one swift motion all that was put into it.”

This being one of the most iconic Cher images, it’s not hard to see why fans would want to toy around with it. But there are larger ramifications to doing so and then trying to pass it off as the real thing…just for fun.