Hany Farid

Along the way, we've worked with journalists, we've worked with courts, we've worked with governments on a range of cases, from a damning photo of a cheating spouse, gut-wrenching images of child abuse, photographic evidence in a capital murder case, and of course, things that we just can't talk about.

It used to be a case would come across my desk once a month.

And then it was once a week.

Now?

It's almost every day.

And the reason for this escalation is a combination of things.

One, generative AI.

We now have the ability to create images that are almost indistinguishable from reality.

Two,

Social media dominates the world and is largely unregulated and actively promotes and amplifies lies and conspiracies over the truth.

And collectively, this means that it is becoming harder and harder to believe anything that we read, see or hear online.

I contend that we are in a global war for truth, with profound consequences for individuals,

for institutions, for societies and for democracies.

And I'd like to spend a little time talking today about what my team and I are doing to try to return some of that trust to our online world and, in turn, our offline world.

For 200 years, it seemed reasonable to trust photographs.

But even in the mid-1800s, it turns out the Victorians had a sense of humor.

They manipulated images.

Or you could alter history.

If you fell out of favor with Stalin, for example, you may be airbrushed out of the history books.

But then, in the turn of the millennium, with the rise of digital cameras and photo editing software, it became easier and easier to manipulate reality.