There is a quiet but catastrophic crisis unfolding in the digital world - one not driven by rogue machines or science-fiction scenarios, but by something far more immediate: the collapse of trust. At the centre of it all is generative AI - tools that can produce startlingly realistic images, videos, voices and text. What started out as a novelty - a viral deepfake of a celebrity, a cloned voice prank, a synthetic political meme - has now begun to gnaw away at the very foundation of public life: our shared reality.

We are nearing a point where the boundary between the real and the artificial has all but disappeared. Videos of public figures making inflammatory statements, images of wars that never happened, synthetic voices delivering false confessions - none of this is theoretical. It is already here, and getting harder to detect. As AI-generated content becomes more convincing, the default human response will soon be suspicion, not trust. This creeping disillusionment is not just a cultural or ethical problem. It is essentially an existential problem........

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