I haven’t enough confidence in my human intelligence to formulate a firm view on the dangers or otherwise of artificial intelligence. What I do know is that before long, we won’t know anything for sure. As it stands, however good a fake might be, you can still just about tell it’s a fake. But only just. Sooner rather than later, the joins will disappear. We might even have already passed that point without knowing it. If the judges of the Sony world photography awards couldn’t spot the fake, what chance have the rest of us got?
Television drama is ahead of the curve on this. The Capture and The Undeclared War were both great and did the subject justice – both gave off an unsettling sense of the end of days. If the twist in every crime drama is some kind of deep fakery, it’s all going to get terribly boring. So, in the outside world, to paraphrase GK Chesterton, everything will go to pot as we’ll believe in nothing or, indeed, anything. And, back home, there won’t even be a decent box set to watch. What a time to be alive.