Henry Ajder, Latent Space Advisory: Deepfakes and the Crisis of Digital Trust

Henry Ajder, Latent Space Advisory: Deepfakes and the Crisis of Digital Trust

From The Road to Accountable AI by Kevin Werbach

April 23, 2026 · 39 min · Season 5 · Episode 7

About this episode

Henry Ajder discusses the challenges posed by AI-generated deepfakes and the implications for digital trust.

AI-generated deepfakes are exploding in volume and quality, posing frightening challenges for public discourse, security, safety, and more. My guest, Henry Ajder, has been mapping the deepfake landscape since before most people had heard the term. In this conversation, he describes the dramatic changes in realism, efficiency, accessibility, and functionality of synthetic media tools since he published the first comprehensive census of deepfakes in 2019. Ajder describes the current moment as one of "epistemic nihilism," where people cannot reliably distinguish real from synthetic content and the available technological responses are not yet at a level of categorical trust. He introduces a framework of "deception, doubt, and degradation" for understanding deepfake harms, and draws a distinction between the clearly malicious, the clearly beneficial, and a vast unsettling middle ground of uses that society has not yet figured out how to evaluate. On the response side, Ajder warns that media literacy advice is not just outdated but actively harmful, because it gives people false confidence in their ability to spot fakes. Detection tools, watermarking, and content provenance standards…

People in this episode

Host: Kevin Werbach

Guest: Henry Ajder

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Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Latent Space Advisory

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