AI-generated media presentations will soon be able to approximate reality well enough to be accepted as reality by all but the most sceptical of us. What do we do when we can no longer trust our own eyes and ears to distinguish between media representations of real objects and events and those which have been fabricated by generative AI prompts?

I say we proceed cautiously, at least until we see how these new threats to our credulity are likely to play out. AI hasn’t yet made us as stupid as Sam Altman, Mark Andreesen, Peter Thiel or Elon Muck Musk would like us to be, so we might as well act like it. If something seems fishy, we shouldn’t accept it at face value, not without checking other sources. If someone wants us to believe in Jesus, UFOs, or Donald Trump’s sincerity, that’s their business. Whether or not it’s our business is up to us. We know the drill: Follow the money. Cui bono? What’s in it for me, for us? Who do you work for? We’re going to have to be masters of scepticism if we want to successfully navigate our way through the coming avalanche of AI-generated fakery.

How is this different from the various cons and manias of the past, from the Shroud of Turin to the Mercury Theater’s alien invasion? The difference is scale—everything, everywhere, all at once—and immersion. If we can’t look away, we’ll have no time to form our own judgments about what’s to be accepted as real and what is not—socially, economically, politically, we’ll be prime candidates for victimization.

In the end, what it comes down to is looking for ways to live which don’t require us to need or want anything offered to us by people we’ve learned, often at great personal cost, not to trust. Simply asking to be left alone is no longer an option.