The spread of “deepfake” technology could shatter the credibility of video evidence, one of our last remaining sources for a widely shared sense of reality and truth.

Once the pet-project of an obscure group of Reddit users, the practice of pasting celebrity faces onto videos has given rise to an explosion of “deepfakes,” pornographic and otherwise.

Social insitutions have long “helped people coalesce around a consensus...about how to describe the world, albeit a fragile consensus that has been unraveling in recent years.”

After two months of reading print news only, Manjoo reports being blissfully unaware of a host of false and misleading claims about current events.