You Can’t Tell

I started noticing these videos in my feeds a while back—Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Emma Watson in explicit films they never actually made. First instinct: another celebrity hack. The expected crime.

But looking closer, these weren’t stolen. They were deepfakes. Really well made ones. The kind where you stare for a full ten seconds trying to decide if what you’re seeing is real. Someone had grafted their faces onto porn stars so cleanly your brain couldn’t quite settle on the truth.

They got banned pretty fast from everywhere, but that’s not how this works. Technology doesn’t uninvent itself. A few years from now the software gets even better and you genuinely can’t tell anymore. Anyone’s face, any situation. The implications are bleak enough that I don’t need to spell them out.

There’s something darkly funny about it that I can’t quite laugh at. If the tech gets good enough, you could theoretically do whatever on camera and later just claim it was AI. How would anyone prove you wrong? But the joke only works if it’s something that happens to you, not something that gets done to you.