With the release of Photosketch, an open source project developed by a group of Chinese students, any computer will suddenly be able to make Photoshop-like image collages better than me. And it’ll do it with only the slightest human intervention.

The operation is simple. You open Photosketch, draw a primitive doodle showing the basic location of objects you want in your composite, describe the objects in captions, and sit back. Photosketch automatically does the photo research, cutting out, arranging and color correction for you. The result is surprisingly decent:

At last, no hypothesized scene of animal versus helicopter carnage will go unrealized.

The implications of this fact (aside from being AWESOME) are surprisingly profound.

As image manipulation becomes increasingly democratized, anybody with a computer will be able to make convincing, simulated photographs with the click of a button. The effect will be a radical change to the economy of images: Suddenly, all pictures, no matter how casually snapped, will be fair game for fakery.

This is already apparent in many of the examples that the developers show. The scenes they depict are almost laughably mundane — a woman throwing a Frisbee to a dog, or a wedding photo on a beach.

This sense of the mundane, ironically, is what’s really weird about this. Previously, time and difficulty (the arduous hours I’ve spent tracing the Photoshop pen tool around objects) made it prohibitively hard to use — especially toward prosaic ends. No longer.

Making subtle adjustments to the content of a photo — or hell, adding a shark — will be as commonplace as the ubiquitous iPhone apps that add “film-like” filters to stills. Inevitably, a mobile version of Photosketch will multiply this effect.

Will the little faith we still have in pictures to depict some semblance of objective reality fall away entirely, as on-the-fly, automated image manipulation becomes more sophisticated?

Perhaps more interestingly, what does this mean for memory (both personal and historical), given that photos are largely constitutive of what events we remember, and how we remember them? In a sense, Photosketch proposes a kind of “augmented memory” in which fictional objects and scenarios can be effectively overlaid onto records of our day-to-day histories.

Even as this technology threatens to baffle the historian, it may prove an aid to the futurist: I propose that a computer program be developed to create an endless series of composites based on random parameters. Inevitably, such a program would begin to create images that precisely depict future events. It could be the job of a specialized surveillance analyst to decipher which of the simulated events are likely to occur.

Here’s a video of the thing in action:

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.