Opinion | The A.O.C. Deepfake Was Terrible. The Proposed Solution Is Delusional. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/opinion/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-deepfake-ai.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_2025081
Last week the television host Chris Cuomo took to social media to share a video that purported to show Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the House floor denouncing that Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans ad as racist.
“Nothing about hamas or people burning jews cars,” Cuomo wrote, in his X post. “But sweeney jeans ad? Deserved time on floor of congress? What happd to this party? Fight for small business … not for small culture wars.”
Except Ocasio-Cortez had never made that speech. The video was a deepfake, generated by artificial intelligence. Cuomo deleted the post, but not before she chided him for “reposting Facebook memes and calling it journalism.”
“Please use your critical thinking skills,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez is right that this should not have happened, but she’s wrong about the remedy. And so are the great many other well-meaning people who think “critical thinking” or “media literacy” are going to help us detect fake videos. They’re already inadequate to the task, and soon will be totally useless, because the technology keeps getting better and better.
Besides, deliberate fakers presumably can apply “critical thinking skills” too, to weed out low quality fakes. If not, there are A.I. programs that can help do it for them. It’s so fast and cheap to generate video or audio mimicking anyone in any context, saying whatever you want them to say or doing whatever you want them to do, so why wouldn’t someone just generate a whole bunch of them and pick the best?
We had long ago lost photos as definite proof, given how easily they could be manipulated. Audio, too, is increasingly easy to fake. Video was among the last bastions of verification, exactly because it was difficult to fake. Now that that’s gone, the real, and increasingly the only, way to be confident of something that one did not witness is to find a reputable source and verify. Ah, what’s a reputable source, you ask? And therein lies what’s left of our society.
Trust the authorities? Well, good luck with that. Authorities aren’t always truthful or correct; making them the final and sole arbiter isn’t going to end well.
So where does that leave the rest of us? What happens if the video in question isn’t about a highly public figure whose actions are tracked closely by multiple credible sources — what if it’s a personal matter or a private communication? What if it seems to show someone cheating, stealing, lying? What if it seems to absolve them of those actions? It doesn’t take much imagination to understand the kind of chaos this will unleash: in courts, in personal lives, in social settings.
Technology facilitates progress by making things that were scarce and difficult into things that are ubiquitous and easy. But rarity and difficulty often serve as safeguards of a sort. Just think of cash: it works not because it’s impossible to make a convincing counterfeit, but because it’s very hard to do so. To be sure, the barriers that scarcity and difficulty create aren’t perfect. They have sometimes worked against public knowledge, blocking important information from widespread view. But they also served a function — you might almost say an evolutionary function — by helping us distinguish the real from the obviously not real. We have built much of our society around that ability. We are not ready for the world in which that and other barriers don’t exist.
