For subscribers

Are we ready for a post-trust world?

With generative AI becoming freely accessible, brace yourself for deepfake overload. Time to marshal truth tools, and your own critical thinking.

Fake images of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket and former US president Donald Trump's arrest are examples generative AI's ability to produce highly realistic photos.

Fake images of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket and former US president Donald Trump's arrest are examples of generative AI's ability to produce highly realistic photos.

PHOTOS: MIDJOURNEY/REDDIT, WEIRD AI CREATIONS/TWITTER

Lim Sun Sun

Follow topic:

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.

Are we ready for a post-trust world?

Follow topic:

See more on