January 2025 · 10 min read

The Rise of Synthetic Media — A Threat to Truth

We are living through a fundamental shift in the nature of media. For the first time in history, the technical barrier to creating convincing fake video, audio and images has been reduced to near zero. What previously required a team of professional visual effects artists working for weeks can now be accomplished by a single person with a laptop in minutes. This democratisation of synthetic media creation has profound implications for public discourse, journalism, democracy and personal safety.

The scale of the problem

The volume of synthetic media being created and shared online is growing exponentially. Researchers estimate that the amount of AI-generated content online doubles roughly every six months. Social media platforms are increasingly flooded with AI-generated profile pictures, AI-written posts and AI-generated images shared as if they were real photographs. Detecting and labelling this content at scale is one of the central challenges facing technology companies, governments and researchers today.

Political and journalistic implications

Synthetic media poses an existential threat to evidence-based journalism. If any video or audio recording can be plausibly dismissed as a deepfake, genuine documentation of events loses its evidentiary value. Politicians have already begun pre-emptively labelling authentic recordings of themselves as deepfakes to deflect accountability — a phenomenon researchers call the liar's dividend. The mere existence of deepfake technology creates doubt about all media, even when it is real.

Solutions and responses

Addressing the synthetic media problem requires a multi-layered response. Technical solutions include content provenance standards that embed cryptographic signatures in media at the point of creation — making it possible to verify the origin and edit history of any image or video. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is developing open standards for this purpose. Detection tools like Chicken AI provide a forensic layer of verification for content that lacks provenance data. Media literacy education helps individuals develop the critical thinking skills to evaluate media claims. Legislation in multiple countries now criminalises the non-consensual creation and distribution of deepfake intimate imagery.