Watching everyone and their mother deep fake their faces onto actors in movie scenes with the click of a phone app this month has only further solidified my fear that our future will likely include not being able to trust our own eyes and ears online.

We can change faces easily now, on stills or moving footage. Hell, it’s a consumer app! We can morph voices. We can anyone say and do whatever we like, as long as its online. The digital puppetry era isn’t coming, it’s here, and I fear it will get very dark.

If deepfakes come out to defame or destroy, who are we to believe? The person swearing up and down that they didn’t do it, or what USED to count as irrefutable proof? And what if those people are no longer around to defend themselves? The dead cannot tell you ‘that’s not me’.

In any case, I have no solutions. Only more questions, and some vague inklings, and MANY deep rooted fears from years of reading science fiction novels that warned about things just like this. Loooong before this technology was even a twinkle in some servers wires.