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The World's Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes
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.
By Eli Saslow Visuals by Erin Schaff
June 14, 2026
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.”
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.
{snip}
“Overall, we find no compelling evidence that the video is fake or has been manipulated,” Farid wrote.
{snip}
In the age of A.I., Hany Farid is struggling to prove what’s real before the internet decides for itself.
By Eli Saslow Visuals by Erin Schaff
June 14, 2026
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.”
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.
{snip}
“Overall, we find no compelling evidence that the video is fake or has been manipulated,” Farid wrote.
{snip}
3 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
