By Jonathan P. Wilkie
Several months ago, I published an article about what I called The Age of Synthetic Reality.
At the time, my concern was relatively straightforward.
Artificial intelligence was becoming sufficiently powerful that photographs could be manufactured, voices could be cloned, videos could be fabricated, identities could be imitated, and stories could be created that looked and sounded sufficiently authentic to fool ordinary people.
I worried that humanity was approaching a boundary beyond which seeing would no longer necessarily mean believing.
I was wrong about one thing.
We were not approaching that boundary.
WE CROSSED IT
And what has happened since is considerably more frightening than a fake photograph of a politician or a clever AI-generated video circulating on social media.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to change the economics of deception itself.
The development that caught my attention this week came from TRM Labs and its 2026 AI-in-Crime Adoption Index.
Its findings deserve considerably more public attention than they have received.
According to TRM Labs, the proportion of scam reports in which AI formed part of the scam—through deepfakes, AI chatbots or AI-related lures—has increased dramatically since 2022. Reported losses associated with deepfake scams have also accelerated sharply.
The important story is the direction.
And the direction is unmistakable.
Artificial intelligence is becoming infrastructure for crime.
—
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF DECEPTION
For centuries, deception had an inconvenient limitation.
It required human labor.
A con artist had to talk to his victim.
A counterfeiter had to manufacture his counterfeit.
A blackmailer had to acquire compromising information.
An impersonator had to learn how another person behaved.
A criminal organization conducting an international fraud operation required people who could speak different languages, prepare documents, maintain relationships with victims, move money and keep the entire fiction alive.
Crime could certainly become organized and industrial.
But human beings remained expensive.
Artificial intelligence changes that equation.
AI is entering multiple stages of criminal operations: identifying and approaching victims, maintaining conversations, adapting communications to a victim’s language and location, impersonating trusted people, and supporting increasingly convincing identity fraud.
Real-time face swapping and voice cloning are also changing how criminals can handle supposed video verification.
That is the transformation we should be discussing.
The great danger of Synthetic Reality is not simply that artificial intelligence can produce a better lie.
It can produce millions of better lies cheaply.
That is industrialization.
The printing press industrialized the reproduction of information.
The Internet industrialized its distribution.
Social media industrialized attention.
Artificial intelligence may now be industrializing persuasion.
And unfortunately, persuasion has never belonged exclusively to the righteous.
—
THE MACHINE IS INNOCENT
There is an important distinction that must be made before we go further.
Artificial intelligence did not suddenly become evil.
A language model does not wake up in the morning consumed by greed.
A voice-cloning program does not covet your bank account.
A graphics generator does not decide to kidnap someone’s child.
The moral agent remains human.
The same technology capable of translating languages, helping scientists analyze data, assisting doctors, tutoring children, helping small businesses, supporting disabled people and, yes, helping an old author organize his thoughts can be appropriated by people with entirely different intentions.
That distinction matters.
The tool may be morally neutral. Its application is not.
And herein lies the problem.
Human ingenuity does not come equipped with an ethical filter.
Give humanity fire and somebody will warm a child while somebody else burns down a village.
Give humanity chemistry and somebody develops antibiotics while somebody else develops poison.
Give humanity aviation and somebody carries passengers across an ocean while somebody else designs a bomber.
Give humanity nuclear physics and we obtain both electrical power and Hiroshima.
Now we have given humanity machines capable of generating language, images, voices, identities, software and persuasive communication at enormous speed.
Why should we have imagined that criminals, extortionists, propagandists and hostile governments would somehow refrain from using them?
They won’t.
They aren’t.
—
FROM FAKE INFORMATION TO FAKE HUMAN BEINGS
The first generation of public anxiety about generative AI concentrated on fake content.
That photograph isn’t real.
That essay wasn’t written by the student.
That celebrity never endorsed that product.
That politician never said those words.
Those remain serious problems.
But Synthetic Reality is evolving beyond fake content toward something more profound:
synthetic identity.
A criminal no longer necessarily needs merely to counterfeit someone’s signature.
Potentially he can counterfeit the person.
His photograph.
His voice.
His manner of speaking.
His identification documents.
His digital history.
His apparent video presence.
And increasingly, pieces of these technologies can be assembled into a believable digital representation of a human being.
That changes one of civilization’s most fundamental assumptions:
that identity precedes trust.
We have spent decades building a digital society around that assumption.
Show me your identification.
Enter your password.
Answer your security question.
Send me your photograph.
Let me hear your voice.
Get on a video call with me.
Each represented another layer of reassurance.
But what happens when the evidence itself can be synthesized?
The question changes from:
“Is this person telling me the truth?”
to something considerably more disturbing:
“Does this person exist?”
—
THE KIDNAPPING CALL
Consider one of the most emotionally brutal possibilities.
Your telephone rings.
You hear the voice of your daughter.
She is crying.
She tells you she has been kidnapped.
Someone takes the telephone.
Pay immediately.
Don’t contact the police.
You recognize your daughter’s voice.
You recognize her mannerisms.
You recognize the panic.
What do you do?
For almost all of human history, hearing the unmistakable voice of your child would have constituted extraordinarily strong evidence.
Synthetic Reality attacks precisely that instinct.
Law-enforcement authorities have already warned that criminals can use generative AI to facilitate fraud involving synthetic audio and video.
Think about the historical significance of that.
Human civilization has developed technology so effective at reproducing human identity that families may need private authentication methods to determine whether the frightened voice of a loved one is actually their loved one.
That sentence would have sounded like science fiction not very long ago.
Today it is personal security.
—
GREED DISCOVERS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Why is this happening so rapidly?
Because greed is an extraordinarily effective early adopter.
We spend enormous intellectual energy discussing AI ethics.
Academics write papers.
Companies establish responsible-AI committees.
Governments hold hearings.
Technology executives testify.
Philosophers debate consciousness.
Researchers discuss alignment.
And those conversations matter enormously.
But somewhere else, someone asks a much simpler question:
How can I use this thing to make money?
If the answer is legitimate commerce, wonderful.
If the answer is stealing somebody’s retirement savings, morality does not necessarily survive the business plan.
That is the uncomfortable collision between technological capability and human nature.
Ethics asks:
Should we?
Greed asks:
Will it work?
Ethics asks:
Who might be harmed?
Avarice asks:
How much can we make?
And greed frequently has one enormous competitive advantage:
It doesn’t wait for the committee meeting.
—
CRIME WITHOUT BORDERS
There is another dimension that makes this particularly dangerous.
Synthetic crime is naturally international.
The victim can be sitting in Florida.
The scammer can be sitting in another hemisphere.
The server can be located in a third country.
The cryptocurrency can travel through a fourth.
The synthetic identity can claim to belong to somebody in a fifth.
And the AI system assisting the deception may have been developed by a perfectly legitimate corporation somewhere else entirely.
Whose laws apply?
Who investigates?
Who prosecutes?
Who even knows where the criminal is?
Technology operates globally.
Law enforcement remains substantially territorial.
That mismatch is not new.
But AI magnifies it.
A fraudster no longer necessarily needs fluent English to convincingly approach an American.
Translation can handle that.
He doesn’t necessarily need to understand American conversational habits perfectly.
AI can help with that.
He doesn’t necessarily need a photographic studio.
Generative imagery can help.
He doesn’t necessarily need an actor who resembles the person being impersonated.
Face swapping can help.
He may not even need an enormous staff capable of simultaneously cultivating thousands of victims.
Automation can help with that too.
Every technical barrier removed expands the potential criminal labor force.
That is what should concern us.
—
WHEN SYNTHETIC REALITY BECOMES STRATEGIC REALITY
Then we reach the level beyond individual crime.
States possess the same tools.
Now imagine Synthetic Reality not as a means of stealing $50,000 from a retiree but as an instrument of strategic conflict.
A fabricated military order.
A convincing recording of a commander.
A synthetic announcement from a political leader.
A fake video showing an atrocity.
Manufactured evidence of an attack.
False communications released at exactly the right moment during a crisis.
Synthetic social-media personalities amplifying the material.
Thousands of automated accounts creating the appearance of public consensus.
The objective does not even have to be convincing everybody that the fabrication is true.
Sometimes destroying certainty is sufficient.
That may become one of the most powerful weapons of Synthetic Reality:
not making humanity believe the lie, but making humanity incapable of agreeing upon the truth.
If everything might be fabricated, authentic evidence itself becomes vulnerable.
A real recording can be dismissed as AI.
A genuine photograph can be called synthetic.
An actual atrocity can be denied as a deepfake.
The technology therefore creates two dangers simultaneously.
False evidence becomes more believable.
And true evidence becomes more deniable.
That second problem may ultimately prove even may even more corrosive.
…
THE DEATH OF “I SAW IT WITH MY OWN EYES”
For thousands of years we have relied upon sensory evidence.
I saw it.
I heard him say it.
There is the photograph.
There is the recording.
There is the document.
Digital technology strengthened that culture initially because cameras became ubiquitous.
Almost everyone carries one.
Events that once disappeared into memory could suddenly be recorded.
Then generative AI inverted the equation.
The abundance of evidence is now accompanied by an abundance of possible fabrication.
We therefore face a strange historical paradox.
Humanity has never possessed more tools for documenting reality.
And humanity may never have had greater difficulty establishing whether particular documentation is real.
That brings us to another development that at first appears unrelated to criminal fraud.
It isn’t.
—
SCIENTISTS ARE ASKING THE SAME QUESTION
Researchers writing in Nature Computational Science recently addressed an emerging world in which artificial intelligence may increasingly plan and execute scientific experiments autonomously.
Their central argument has relevance far beyond the laboratory.
Trust should increasingly rest upon provenance: a record of what was reasoned, performed and measured that can subsequently be reopened, audited and corrected.
Think about that.
Scientists confronting autonomous AI are arriving at a principle that the rest of digital civilization may desperately need:
Do not trust merely because something looks convincing.
Ask where it came from.
Ask how it was created.
Ask what happened to it.
Ask whether the record can be audited.
That is provenance.
And provenance may become one of the most important words of the Synthetic Age.
—
FROM TRUSTING APPEARANCES TO TRUSTING HISTORY
For most of our lives, authenticity has largely been judged through appearance.
Does the signature look right?
Does the voice sound right?
Does the photograph look real?
Does the website look professional?
Does the person on the screen resemble the person I know?
Artificial intelligence is systematically weakening each of those tests.
So perhaps digital civilization must migrate toward another model.
Instead of asking:
Does this look authentic?
we ask:
Can its history be authenticated?
Where did this image originate?
Which device recorded it?
Was it altered?
Who altered it?
When?
Can the chain of custody be verified?
Can the person communicating with me demonstrate identity through something more reliable than appearance?
This will require technology.
It will require standards.
It will require cooperation between governments and companies.
But above all, it will require an enormous cultural adjustment.
We are going to have to teach ourselves not to believe our eyes quite so easily.
—
WHAT BECOMES OF JOURNALISM?
For those of us who write publicly, this issue becomes personal.
Journalism has always depended upon credibility.
A writer tells the reader:
I investigated this.
These are my sources.
This is what I believe happened.
You may disagree with my interpretation, but the evidence beneath the argument exists.
Synthetic Reality threatens that relationship.
When the Internet becomes saturated with machine-generated articles, fabricated photographs, synthetic experts, nonexistent eyewitnesses, automated comments and artificially manufactured popularity, how does a reader distinguish journalism from simulation?
Perhaps journalism will have to rediscover something old.
Reputation.
Not follower counts.
Not likes.
Not algorithmic visibility.
Reputation.
A history of saying what you know.
A willingness to say what you don’t know.
Corrections when you’re wrong.
Sources readers can examine.
Clear separation between evidence and opinion.
And perhaps, increasingly, a record of whether AI participated in producing the work and how.
In an age of infinite synthetic information, credibility may become scarce.
And scarcity creates value.
—
OUR AUDACITY TO TALK ABOUT ETHICS
I confess to a certain irony here.
I have spent considerable time thinking and writing about AI ethics and even proposing universal principles that AI developers should consider.
One could look at the criminal developments now unfolding and laugh at such idealism.
Greed and avarice certainly seem capable of outrunning ethics.
But that would be the wrong conclusion.
The emergence of abuse does not make ethical principles irrelevant.
It makes them urgent.
We created traffic laws because automobiles could kill people.
We created aviation rules because airplanes could crash.
We created medical ethics because physicians possess extraordinary power over vulnerable human beings.
Power creates responsibility precisely because power can be abused.
Artificial intelligence represents an extraordinary concentration of informational power.
Therefore the ethical conversation cannot remain confined to what AI developers should make their systems capable of doing.
We also have to ask:
What safeguards should accompany those capabilities?
What responsibilities do platforms have when synthetic impersonation is discovered?
What obligations do financial institutions have when identity itself can be manufactured?
How should telecommunications companies respond to voice cloning?
How should governments cooperate when an AI-assisted criminal enterprise operates across five jurisdictions?
How do we authenticate legitimate information without creating a surveillance society in the process?
These are difficult questions.
There will not be ten easy commandments that solve them.
But abandoning morality because criminals ignore morality would be surrender.
—
ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE IS A MIRROR
Perhaps AI is teaching humanity something uncomfortable about itself.
We keep asking whether machines will become good or evil.
Maybe that question distracts us.
Artificial intelligence is becoming an extraordinary amplifier of human intention.
Give it to a scientist seeking a cure and it can amplify discovery.
Give it to an educator and it can amplify instruction.
Give it to an artist and it can amplify imagination.
Give it to a criminal and it can amplify deception.
Give it to a propagandist and it can amplify manipulation.
Give it to an authoritarian government and it may amplify control.
The machine reflects the hand directing it.
That makes AI not merely a technological revolution.
It makes AI something approaching a moral stress test for civilization.
We are discovering what humanity does when extraordinary cognitive power becomes inexpensive and widely available.
Some of the answer is magnificent.
Some of it is horrifying.
—
THE COMING SCARITY: TRUST
For centuries information itself was scarce.
Books were expensive.
Libraries were precious.
Publishing required capital.
Broadcasting required infrastructure.
The Internet destroyed much of that scarcity.
Generative AI is now destroying the remaining scarcity of production.
We are entering a world in which words, photographs, voices, music, videos and entire digital personalities can be generated almost without limit.
Therefore information may no longer be the scarce commodity.
Trust will be.
Who produced this?
Can I verify it?
Does this person exist?
Did this event occur?
Has this image been altered?
Is this my daughter’s voice?
Is this actually my bank?
Is this politician really speaking?
Is this scientific result reproducible?
Is this journalist human?
Is this eyewitness real?
Those questions will define the next phase of the Internet.
And they may define something even larger.
They may determine whether open digital society remains workable.
—
SYNTHETIC REALITY HAS ARRIVED
When I first wrote about Synthetic Reality, I considered it a warning.
Today I consider it a description.
We are already there.
Not completely.
Not irreversibly.
And certainly not without defenses.
But the transformation is underway.
The recent evidence concerning AI-assisted crime is important not because one form of fraud is the whole problem.
It isn’t.
It is important because it provides a measurable window into something broader:
Criminals are learning how to integrate artificial intelligence into established methods of deception.
Meanwhile, scientists contemplating autonomous AI are telling us that trustworthy systems require records that can be examined and audited.
Crime and science could hardly be further apart.
Yet both developments point toward the same conclusion.
The future of trust cannot depend solely upon appearance.
We will need provenance.
Authentication.
Accountability.
Human judgment.
And perhaps something technology cannot manufacture at all:
character.
…
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DID NOT INVENT GREED
It did not invent fraud.
It did not invent kidnapping, blackmail, propaganda, warfare or avarice.
Human beings managed all of those quite successfully without computers.
What AI has done is hand human intention an extraordinarily powerful amplifier.
And now we are discovering what happens when both our angels and our demons are given the same machine.
That should scare us.
It scares me.
But fear should not become paralysis.
It should become awareness.
Because the central struggle of the Synthetic Age may ultimately have surprisingly little to do with whether machines become conscious.
It may instead depend upon whether human beings remain morally conscious while using them.
That is the conversation I believe we need to have.
And quickly.
Welcome to the Industrialization of Deception.
Welcome to Synthetic Reality.
— Jonathan P. Wilkie
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Copyright Jonathan P. Wilkie
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