Deep fakes - How do we know what is real? |
Imagine it’s two days before a crucial local election. You’re scrolling through your feed and stop on a video of a candidate you were leaning toward. The video is grainy, seemingly captured on a hidden phone, and in it, the candidate is saying something abhorrent – a racial slur, an admission of corruption, something that instantly disqualifies them in your eyes. You feel a surge of betrayal. You share the video. The outrage cycle begins.
Crucially, your eyes did not deceive you. The video was flawless. The lip movements matched the audio perfectly; the signature mannerisms were all there. Yet, the event never happened. The candidate was home eating dinner when they were supposedly recorded. You have just been duped by a deepfake.
For the past century, photography and film have served as the anchor of our shared reality. The old adage “seeing is believing” wasn’t just a saying; it was a functional rule of society. If you saw a photo of a crime scene or news footage of a disaster, you accepted it as historical fact. We used visual evidence to hold power to account, to verify scientific breakthroughs, and to document........