The photograph in Arthur’s article showed what had happened in a particular street. Taken with a telephoto lens from an upper storey of a building, it showed a chaotic and almost surreal scene: about 70 vehicles of all sizes jumbled up and scattered at crazy angles along the length of the street.

It was an astonishing image which really stopped me in my tracks. Not surprisingly, it also went viral on social media. And then came the reaction: “AI image, fake news.” The photograph was so vivid, so uncannily sharp and unreal, that it looked to viewers like something that they could have faked themselves using Midjourney or Dall-E or a host of other generative AI tools.