Reality Check
May 13, 2026 at 04:30PMFor Science, Kai Kupferschmidt profiles Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at UC Berkeley who specializes in determining whether images or videos have been manipulated. Since helping establish the field more than 20 years ago, Farid has been “engaged in an arms race with technology: the advent of digital photography, ever more sophisticated editing tools, and now AI.” Today, journalists and researchers contact him daily to authenticate footage, and his meticulous methods to separate fact from fabrication—physics and geometry, shadows and reflections—feel more necessary than ever.
It was a high-profile forgery that helped Farid realize the solution lay in physics. During the 2004 U.S. presidential election, a photo showing Democratic candidate John Kerry next to actress Jane Fonda at an anti–Vietnam War protest had created a stir before being exposed as a fake made from two separate photos. Combining people from different photos in this way should lead to detectable differences in lighting, Farid reasoned—something he could look out for when authenticating images. He began asking the same question he would ask 20 years later when he analyzed the video from Iran: Is the scene consistent with the physics of the real world? “Shadows are amazing. Lighting is amazing. Geometry is amazing,” he says. “3D reconstruction is a huge part of what I do.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/05/13/deepfakes-digital-forensics-hany-farid/
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