Reality is losing the deepfake war
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Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.
New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Appattel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, we're going to talk about reality and whether we can label photos and videos to protect our shared understanding of the world around us. No, really, we're going to go there.
It's a deep one. To do this, I'm going to bring on Verge reporter Jess Weatherbet, who covers creative tools like Photoshop and Canva for us. It's a space that's been totally upended by generative AI in a huge variety of ways, with an equally huge number of responses from artists, creatives, and the people who consume all of that art and creative out in the world. Now, if you've been listening to Decoder or my other show, The Vergecast, or even just reading The Verge over these past few years, you'll know that we've been talking about how the photos and videos taken by our phones are getting more and more processed and AI generated for years now. And now, in 2026, we're in the middle of a full-on reality crisis, as fake and manipulated, ultra-believable images and videos flood onto social platforms at scale, and without regard for responsibility or norms or even basic decency.
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