Black and white photo postcard of a man driving a flatbed horse-drawn wagon carrying a pig more than twice the size of the horses pulling it. A farm house is partly in frame too. 'Photo by Tinsley' is hand-written.

My son sent me a picture of a blurry coywolf running in front of his house this afternoon. This evening he had my young granddaughter say “April Fools!” during our video chat. The photo was a product of AI.

Our fascination with such fakes doesn’t just go back to Photoshop and before that photocopiers. There were plenty of joke postcards in the early twentieth century, many of them agricultural. There were ears of corn as long as hay wagons, onions that took two men to roll up a ramp into a truck or wagon, a Maine potato that filled a whole flatbed rail car, and so on. The jackalope was also popular.

Image via Bill Lende collection of tall tale postcards, The Newberry Digital Collections, id NL12843G.