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 New York Times, June 14, 2026

Eli Saslow

Visuals by Erin Schaff

, The New York Times ; 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.

"For more than two decades, Farid, 60, had been the world’s leading expert in the field of digital forensics, but in the last six months he’d stopped trusting his own eyes. He’d made a career of differentiating visual reality from deepfakes as he fielded requests each day from governments, human rights organizations, journalists, law enforcement and thousands of others who were increasingly confused and deceived by the online world. Farid’s own research had proven that most people could no longer distinguish a real photograph from a digital creation, a real voice from an A.I. clone, a real video clip from a wholesale fabrication. Lately, he was failing his own tests.

“I feel like I’m going blind,” Farid said, and he worried that A.I. was obscuring the truth, distorting reality, fracturing democracies and slowly breaking him, too. He and his wife had begun making plans to leave California and trade the tech culture of Silicon Valley for a farm in rural Vermont."

Slick Tom Cruise Deepfakes Signal That Near Flawless Forgeries May Be Here; NPR, March 11, 2021

Emma Bowman, NPR; Slick Tom Cruise Deepfakes Signal That Near Flawless Forgeries May Be Here

"In a crop of viral videos featuring Tom Cruise, it's not the actor's magic trick nor his joke-telling that's deceptive — but the fact that it's not actually Tom Cruise at all.

The videos, uploaded to TikTok in recent weeks by the account @deeptomcruise, have raised new fears over the proliferation of believable deepfakes — the nickname for media generated by artificial intelligence technology showing phony events that often seem realistic enough to dupe an audience.

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told NPR's All Things Considered that the Cruise videos demonstrate a step up in the technology's evolving sophistication."