Deepfake Landscapes: Take your quiz

Finishing a January of fakescapes. Pop quiz!

First to quiz Photoshop: Using that same panorama where I really did oops leave a blank pane, I later created another blank box (above), just to have Photoshop create three alternative fills.

And then to quiz you: it's the old game of "one of these things is not like the other." Try to find the true one:

(If the picture above does not change every few seconds, click it to open in a new tab. If that does not work click this, this, this and this to open in tabs.)

"Of course," to quote John Clark of the University of Kansas, "it's bullshit." I certainly can't identify those— species?— that Photoshop conjured. It's vegetation in the way that paisley is vegetation. But, as Joseph Heller said, "If the figure is a lie, it is a very impressive lie." It would probably fool most of us, i.e. make us more foolish, i.e. make us more demented.

Sorry for the low resolution. This may not be the quote Clark would have chosen to have remembered, but it's the one that delighted grad students. I shot the second one, with spruce branches coming from Christmas trees not from vegetatish blobs. Vegetatish (in English) is a Google Gooseegg. "Sesame Street - One Of These Things - food and mitten - Bob (1969)," YouTube. Joseph Heller, Picture This, Putnam, 1988, pages 18, 100, 313 according to Google Books. Robert Wellman Campbell, "Deepfake Landscapes: Take your quiz," RSS Longa, 29 January 2026, public domain via CC0 1.0.