A Pretty Face and a Fake Past

I came across a photograph supposedly showing Camille Monfort, a nineteenth-century French opera singer known as the “Vampire of the Amazon.” It has everything needed to stop someone scrolling: a beautiful woman, an elaborate hairstyle, aged photographic texture, and a sensational story. It also looked manufactured, which turned out to be a reasonable suspicion. The supposed historical figure traces back to modern gothic fiction. The portrait came from a different fictional work by Philipe Kling David, who explicitly confirmed that he created it with AI. Somewhere along the way, the invented woman and the invented biography became attached to each other and circulated as history. Apparently, a convincing sepia tint is all the documentation some people need. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="0"} I have no objection to someone writing about an Amazonian vampire or using AI to illustrate the story. Those are perfectly reasonable creative uses. The problem begins when the fiction label…