Source: The New York Times
Hany Farid spent two decades building forensic tools that defined the field. He now says detection technology has lost the arms race to generation technology. This is not a setback for one researcher. It signals a structural collapse of the authentication layer that institutions—courts, newsrooms, platforms—have relied on to separate real from synthetic media. Verification now depends almost entirely on metadata, chain-of-custody records, and institutional trust rather than technical analysis of the image itself. That shift favors whoever controls the tools and the narrative.