The medieval world had its own ‘deepfakes’ – church officials cited a fake imperial decree for centuries

By Vanessa Corcoran, Director of Catholic Studies, Georgetown University

With deepfakes on the rise, forgery and deception are often viewed as distinctly modern problems – a new era of misinformation made possible by artificial intelligence. One of the first alarming cases occurred at the start of the war in Ukraine when a doctored video appeared to show President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his soldiers to lay down their weapons.

Yet the impulse to deceive people by fabricating evidence far predates the digital age. And…

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