Kate Middleton conspiracies are just a harbinger of a future we should all fear

Where’s Kate Middleton?

To borrow from the National Enquirer’s once ubiquitous ’80s catchphrase, inquiring minds want to know.

And they’re not just passively eating what is fed to them. Nope they’re all Miss Marples on Adderall — harnessing the full power of the World Wide Web, aggressively concocting and dispensing wild theories and digging deep rabbit holes.

There have been four photos of the Princess of Wales released since it was announced in January that she would be taking three months off from royal duties to recover from abdominal surgery. And each one has only fueled more speculation about what’s really going on with her. Or hell, if the photos are even of her, or a doppelganger.

The Kate-anon cult includes the likes of Kim Kardashian (“On my way to go find Kate,” she captioned an Instagram photo) and Andy Cohen (“That ain’t Kate,” he tweeted after the release of the latest picture of the princess in the wild).

On the one hand, what’s the harm in poking some fun at the royals’ expense?

On the other, all of this faux-photo-fueled palace intrigue and conspiracy is starting to feel like a harbinger of some wacky, darker stuff to come for society — where we all start to question what is even real.

PhotoShop, AI, deepfakes: As technology improves, so does our skepticism of who and what to believe.

Even Google has betrayed our trust as its Gemini chatbot image-generation tool served up wildly inaccurate images depicting black Vikings, female popes and Native Americans mixed in among the Founding Fathers.

We’ve officially stepped into the portal; it’s the bizarro world science fiction writers have been promising for generations. And it’s scary as hell.

After Middleton ’fessed up to doctoring a UK Mother’s Day portrait — shot by her husband, Prince William — of herself and her kids, news agencies have started scrutinizing other photos snapped by Middleton and officially released by Buckingham Palace.

On Tuesday, Getty Images warned that one picture of the late Queen Elizabeth with her grandchildren, shot by Middleton in 2022 and released the next year, “has been digitally enhanced at source.”

Meanwhile, the 2024 presidential election cycle has already seen deepfake videos and images making their into campaign reels to both bolster and diminish candidates. And even when images are genuine, one can simply blame it on AI.

Donald Trump did.

In response to the Hur report, which called into question Joe Biden’s memory and cognitive abilities, Dem politicians fired back with a montage of gaffes by Trump.

The 77-year-old immediately said it was an AI fabrication.

Why not? Sometimes it is, like the photo of Trump’s head on the corpulent body of golfer John Daly that made the rounds last month.

“The Fake News used Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to create the picture … ,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “These are despicable people, but everyone knows that.”

Even when images are ridiculous, smart people — including ones I know — have fallen for them.

Remember when the masses were fooled by a pic of the pope styling in Balenciaga last year?

It’s all creating a culture of mistrust and simmering doubt, and shaking the landscape of our shared reality.

And when we finally, eventually learn what really ailed Middleton, it’s sure to be so pedestrian that people won’t even believe that either.