How do you know if that shocking photo in your feed is real, or just another AI fake? Digital forensics expert Hany Farid explains how he helps journalists, courts and governments find structural errors in AI-generated images, offering four practical tips everyday individuals can use when facing the internet’s war on reality.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Imagine this. You're looking at a grainy photograph of soldiers who've been taken hostage. Is this photo real or fake? Until recently, this question wouldn't have been difficult to answer, but today it may be the first thing we need to ask.
In this talk, digital forensic scientist Hani Farid warns of the fast-approaching dangers of generative AI in forever changing our understanding of truth and facts and says that when it comes to our engagement with technology, we're at a pivotal fork in the road. It all comes down to what choice we will make.
Stick around after his talk for a brief Q&A between Hani and Lateef Nasser, the co-host of Radiolab and a guest curator at TED 2025. And tune into this very feed later today for a special conversation between Hani Farid and me, where we dig into some of the deeper ideas from his talk.
You are a senior military officer, and you've just received a chilling message on social media. Four of your soldiers have been taken, and if demands are not met in the next 10 minutes, they will be executed. All you have to go on is this grainy photo, and you don't have the time to figure out if four of your soldiers are in fact missing. What's your first move?
If I may be so bold, your first move is to contact somebody like me and my team. I am by training an applied mathematician and computer scientist, and I know that seems like a very strange first call at a moment like this. But I've spent the last 30 years developing technologies to analyze and authenticate digital images and digital videos.
Along the way, we've worked with journalists, we've worked with courts, we've worked with governments on a range of cases, from a damning photo of a cheating spouse, gut-wrenching images of child abuse, photographic evidence in a capital murder case, and of course, things that we just can't talk about. It used to be a case would come across my desk once a month. And then it was once a week. Now?
It's almost every day. And the reason for this escalation is a combination of things. One, generative AI. We now have the ability to create images that are almost indistinguishable from reality. Two, Social media dominates the world and is largely unregulated and actively promotes and amplifies lies and conspiracies over the truth.
And collectively, this means that it is becoming harder and harder to believe anything that we read, see or hear online. I contend that we are in a global war for truth, with profound consequences for individuals, for institutions, for societies and for democracies.
And I'd like to spend a little time talking today about what my team and I are doing to try to return some of that trust to our online world and, in turn, our offline world. For 200 years, it seemed reasonable to trust photographs. But even in the mid-1800s, it turns out the Victorians had a sense of humor. They manipulated images. Or you could alter history.
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