A video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky telling his soldiers to surrender to Russia? Plausible. A photo of French President Emmanuel Macron running away from pension reform protesters? Intriguing. The image of Pope Francis in a white designer puffer coat? Convincing.

Yet all three were fake, all three went viral and there are heaps more where they came from. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of fabricating endless hyper-realistic images and videos, enhanced with compelling audio produced through AI voice-cloning. As image generators such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion become freely accessible to the masses, we must also brace ourselves for misinformation and disinformation to proliferate more than ever.