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The World's Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes
In the age of A.I., Hany Farid is struggling to prove what’s real before the internet decides for itself.The emails began to arrive on a Sunday morning, as the worst ones often did. Hany Farid opened the first message at his home in the hills above Berkeley and found a link to a viral video purporting to show a U.S.-made missile hitting an elementary school in Iran, where more than 150 people had been killed, most of them children. “Is this an internet hoax or an international war crime?” one note read. “We’re trying to verify what’s real.”
Farid grabbed a pencil and a notepad, leaned into his computer and watched. He saw blue sky, telephone wires and a few palm trees swaying in the wind. Then a missile streaked across the screen, clear and unmistakable even at 500 miles per hour. It looked like a scene from a video game. In the last few days, Farid had reviewed dozens of convincing A.I.-generated videos of fake bombings, fake plane crashes, fake fires and fake executions. His instinct was to be skeptical. He was nearly certain the video was another fake.
He chewed on his pencil and watched it again, slowing down the video, breaking it apart frame by frame. The camera shook in a way that seemed plausible for an amateur filming with a cellphone. The shadows were geometrically accurate. He watched the missile strike a building and noticed a short delay before he heard an explosion and high-pitched screams, which seemed consistent with the speed of sound. Maybe the video was real. It had already been viewed at least 1.1 million times on social media. With each passing second, it was becoming reality, whether it was real or not.
“Anyone can create a video of anything or anybody, doing or saying anything,” Farid wrote back. “This will take a little time.”
Farid grabbed a pencil and a notepad, leaned into his computer and watched. He saw blue sky, telephone wires and a few palm trees swaying in the wind. Then a missile streaked across the screen, clear and unmistakable even at 500 miles per hour. It looked like a scene from a video game. In the last few days, Farid had reviewed dozens of convincing A.I.-generated videos of fake bombings, fake plane crashes, fake fires and fake executions. His instinct was to be skeptical. He was nearly certain the video was another fake.
He chewed on his pencil and watched it again, slowing down the video, breaking it apart frame by frame. The camera shook in a way that seemed plausible for an amateur filming with a cellphone. The shadows were geometrically accurate. He watched the missile strike a building and noticed a short delay before he heard an explosion and high-pitched screams, which seemed consistent with the speed of sound. Maybe the video was real. It had already been viewed at least 1.1 million times on social media. With each passing second, it was becoming reality, whether it was real or not.
“Anyone can create a video of anything or anybody, doing or saying anything,” Farid wrote back. “This will take a little time.”
I knew it was going to be bad, but this is horrifying, much worse than I could have imagined.
There is much more at the link - free gift article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/us/ai-deepfake-hany-farid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qFA.QWPU.TQF5nIAL6nsM&smid=url-share