"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."
