During the internet’s more naive days, the rallying cry when people saw something unbelievable was “pics or it didn’t happen.”
But of course, it’s hard for even photos to prove anything nowadays as people are well aware of the wonders that gifted photo editors can create using Photoshop . And if there weren’t so many examples of people botching their fakes, it’s possible that so many of us never would have found out what was going on.
And now that deepfakes are a thing, it seems we have to treat videos with a similar skepticism. But as the old saying goes, “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
And that’s a lesson that the makers of one TV show recently learned after their production designers took an unfortunate shortcut.
On October 13, Dutch influencer Rianne Meijer posted a TikTok in which she shared a stunning revelation that had recently been brought to her attention.
To set the scene for what had happened, she called back to this photo from 2019 of her embracing her boyfriend, a doctor named Roy Atiya.
Keen to leave her followers in suspense for a moment, she then cut to a scene from a Chinese drama.
As Insider reported , this show is called Summer Again and started airing on a streaming platform called iQiyi in July.
And it turns out that one of Meijer’s followers happened to be watching this show and alerted her when she noticed something familiar.
As Meijer soon revealed, that photo found its way into the show with one major difference.
We can see here that in her place was the show’s ballet dancer protagonist, played by actress Li Borong.
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Hardly containing her laughter, Meijer said, “I mean, they look good together, I don’t know, it’s fine.”
But while Meijer just saw this as a case of the strange magic of the internet, it seems the show’s crew took the discovery more seriously.
According to Insider, she made a follow-up statement the next day stating that unspecified representatives of the show’s crew had reached out to her and apologized for using and editing the photo without her permission.
But as she said in response, “They are so sweet and this gave us a good laugh.”
And with any luck, the video available here can give you a good laugh too.
h/t: Insider
