Source: WIRED
The infrastructure designed to authenticate reality—from reverse image search to metadata analysis—is failing faster than it can be rebuilt. Journalists and forensic experts can no longer reliably distinguish synthetic from authentic content. The problem isn't just bad actors flooding platforms with deepfakes. The cost of fabrication has dropped below the cost of verification, inverting the economics of trust. Detection tools exist. The bottleneck is institutional attention: the human labor required to use them. Newsrooms and platforms have systematically defunded this work in favor of algorithmic moderation.