We Haven't Seen the Worst of Fake News

It was 2018, and the world as we knew it--or rather, how we knew it--teetered on a precipice. Against a rising drone of misinformation, The New York Times, the BBC, Good Morning America, and just about everyone else sounded the alarm over a new strain of fake but highly realistic videos. Using artificial intelligence, bad actors could manipulate someone's voice and face in recorded footage almost like a virtual puppet and pass the product off as real. In a famous example engineered by BuzzFeed, Barack Obama seemed to say, "President Trump is a total and complete dipshit." Synthetic photos, audio, and videos, collectively dubbed "deepfakes," threatened to destabilize society and push us into a full-blown "infocalypse."