It’s strange, isn’t it, how the most fascinating dinner-party topic of our lifetime turned out not to be football, or politics, or even the weather, but artificial intelligence. Nobody saw that coming. A few years ago, if you mentioned algorithms or neural networks, eyes glazed over; today, mention ChatGPT or Gemini and suddenly everyone has a story. Maybe it’s a trick, like asking the chatbot to write a poem about a traffic jam, or a genuinely moving piece of code that helped a friend draft a difficult letter. Or maybe the conversation turns to bigger things: the global race for…

Imagine scrolling through your social media feed and seeing a video of a familiar face—a family member, a trusted colleague, maybe even a public figure—saying something they would never say. It looks real, sounds real, but it is not. This is the unsettling reality of deepfakes, synthetic media created to mimic a person’s likeness and put false words or actions into their mouth. Deepfakes have grown from a niche internet curiosity into a widespread public safety concern, with studies showing a 550% increase in deepfake content between 2019 and 2023. As artificial intelligence tools become more accessible and easier to…