I am not someone who really cares for the royal family. It’s not that I have anything against them per se, it’s just that Royal gossip’s not really my thing. 

But even I have to admit... when a 'Kill Notice’ flashed across newsroom wires around the World because the big news agencies had just realised that Princess Kate’s photo had been doctored, even my usual royal ambivalence was defied. 

My Dad loves to tell you that digital photos aren’t real. Unlike film, which uses light and chemicals to relay an image onto a physical medium, digital photos store information using numerical values, ultimately conveying a hyper-accurate representation of a scene. 

You don’t have to be a coffee table philosopher to determine that the image of Kate and the royal children was not a very good piece of photoshopping. And with the power of however many million internet sleuths unleashed on the investigation, things only seemed to get more suspicious. 

One user found an image taken last year at an event in which all the royal children were wearing the same outfits as in the doctored photo released this week. The palace said the photo was new, but could it actually have originated in November? 

And the next day, when a snapper published a photo apparently showing Kate and her husband in the back seat of a car, internet uses seized upon what they thought were irregularities in the background of the image. It made for a compelling argument. Who could be sure what to believe? 

Surely the easiest way to quash the frenzy would have been for Kate to make a public appearance, but of course the Palace says she is recovering from abdominal surgery and but for her short apology for the doctored image, the PR machine has stayed quiet. 

The purpose of publishing the photo was to stop the wild speculation and conspiracy theories brewing online about Kate’s whereabouts. It could not possibly have had a greater opposite effect. 

But it struck me in the fallout... We might look back at this moment as a charming little episode in the annals of technology. As AI technology accelerates and supersedes stuff like manual photoshopping, we’re at the very end of a period where this kind of amateur error is possible. 

Regardless of who publishes it, any time we see a photo published anywhere, we will have to have a little sliver of scepticism in the back of our minds. 

Is it real or is it fake? Most of the time, we will never truly know.