The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/us/ai-deepfake-hany-farid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qFA.3YHm.LWbLuflyMqmv

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“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”


Having grown up pre-Internet I’ve always just assumed everything on the Internet is fake. It looks like that was the way to go. People really need to adpot that line of thinking now. Treat everything as sus ;)

That’s exactly what i do. When I see something and deem it important for me (i don’t care to check random memes or cat pictures because it’s not relevant if the images exist in real life), i try to find other sources to verify the content. I also realize that even if i found supporting evidence, it’s still information from the internet and therefor in general not trustworthy - just like any unsigned message has no inherent authenticity.



Thank you for your ancient wisdom.



This will eventually settle into a new era of going back to times where people didn’t have cameras in their pockets.

People eventually will start believing only other people who have some reputation at stake. Like journalists and similar.

It won’t happen overnight. A lot of harm and bad will happen before we learn it.

I think it’s more likely that we’ll need some cryptographic verification at time of recording to be valid, or a physical medium like film to be present. So perhaps film cameras or discs (non rewritable) have a resurgence.

I think we will end up not knowing what is true or false. It is Orwell all the way. People will stop caring. Noone will safe us.


That can all be faked.

It’s a hard problem, but there is likely a way with cryptography and upload to server that would be verifiable. Honestly this may be the only legitimate use of blockchain.

It would require a centralized authority to work in any meaningful way.

Not true. This is something I had researched in the early days. If you can store a crypto hash of the document on a Blockchain, you can upload said document anywhere you want for people to DL. The hashes will always match, and you can use the timestamp of the Blockchain entry as reference to veracity. This could be done via an open source project and should the maintainers fall off the map, some one can always fork.

I remember seeing this listed as something like “proof of existence”.

It just means the file existed at the time. I guess that’s useful to an extent. Maybe bodycams could upload hashes of 1 second segments of video & audio delay but it’s ± limited to that.



Not really

You can publish public keys and sign the videos with private keys

It still doesn’t prove the video is not AI, just that it comes from a specific source, like a press camera

You can always retroactively sign. Or it would require secretive hardware managed by some centralized authority, and would be exploitable by at least nation state actors.






Meaning that we can no longer trust any “accidentally open mike” videos

But yeah




Let’s burn down all the data centers

Wait! Let me backup my sheit first!!



Was with family and wanted to find a clip on YouTube that demonstrated people being tricked by 3d chalk art. I couldn’t find a clip that was not AI slop (lots and lots of these) or just faked reactions. Won’t bother trying that again :D


I know you didn‘t notice the gorilla either when you tried to count how often the ball was thrown in that clip. We could never really trust our eyes and that‘s okay.


There is no spoon.


Would having experts capable of telling real videos from fake ones even solve the main problem, that being the problem of public perception? The experts would have an important role in, for example, intelligence agencies, but the public is still going to trust its eyes, and in the presence of multiple contradictory videos, its biases, especially since there’s always going to be someone claiming to be an expert to back them up.


I was told we would always be able to tell.


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