When everything could plausibly be fake, liars benefit — even when they're lying about footage from the National Archives.
Back in 2018, two legal scholars — Danielle Citron and Robert Chesney — published research warning about what they called “the liar’s dividend.” The concept is simple but chilling: as AI-generated content becomes more sophisticated, liars benefit even when they’re not using AI themselves.
“If the public loses faith in what they hear and see and truth becomes a matter of opinion, then power flows to those whose opinions are most prominent — empowering authorities along the way,” they wrote in the California Law Review. “A skeptical public will be primed to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence.”
This is the key insight. The liar’s dividend doesn’t require actually creating deepfakes. It just requires a public that’s uncertain enough about what’s real that they’ll accept “it’s fake” as a reasonable explanation for anything inconvenient.
Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies digital forensics, explained it this way in an interview with the AP: “I’ve always contended that the larger issue is that when you enter this world where anything can be fake, then nothing has to be real. You get to deny any reality because all you have to say is, ‘It’s a deepfake.’”
