During the pandemic, I did something stupid: I published a book. Bookstores were closed, so authors obviously could not promote their books by going on tour. Like a lot of other titles that came out in 2021, "The Stringer" — a graphic novel written by me and drawn by Pablo Callejo — got lost in the shuffle.

Too bad, and not just for my bottom line. It was a good read about an important topic: deepfakes. What would happen, I wondered after considering the intersection of underemployed reporters in an age of decline with their deep connections to the dangerous places some of them cover, if a rogue journalist were to manipulate global politics — and even start wars — by creating fake imagery and audio of world leaders insulting one another?

Behind that question lies a deeper philosophical and psychological concern. What do human beings do after they come to accept that they cannot believe anything they read, hear or see? What if there is no reliable way to tell the difference between reality and artifice? What happens?

Learned helplessness?

Revolution?

Nothing?

Americans have always lived in an era when politicians lied and news organizations misled, typically through sins of omission. Democratic-aligned news orgs ignore Benghazi and Biden's mental decline; Republican ones neglect to follow up MIA WMDs and promises of $2-a-gallon gas.

There used to be ways to triangulate the truth. Myriad news sources from a wide range of ideological viewpoints and formats, all financially incentivized to check and criticize one another, competed within metro areas and across the nation. The decline of print as a profit model, corporate consolidation and legacy journalists succumbing to the race for clicks in a highly polarized political landscape have since reduced both the frequency and the reliability of verification and debunking between rivals.

Until a few years ago, stories were almost never made up out of whole cloth. Bias manifested itself through which aspects of a story were emphasized or ignored in order to decontextualize events. Now, if you are a reasonably savvy news consumer, the first thing you have to ask yourself is: Is this real? Did this really happen?

Ninety-four percent of U.S. social media users told a recent CNET poll that they encounter AI-created or altered content, but only 44% of adults feel confident that they can tell real photos and videos from fakes. I've been fooled. Now, when I watch a video, I tell myself: Wait a minute. This might be BS.

Eighty-four percent of respondents to an international March Malwarebytes survey say that video evidence no longer feels like proof.

Nor does lack of evidence. When Donald Trump's ballyhooed $16 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., turned sour — with algae blooms turning the water green and the newly installed blue bottom disintegrating — the president quickly blamed unidentified vandals for using some sort of box cutter to create a 350-foot-long slash a foot and a half below the water line. No one, not even Trump-affiliated media outlets like Fox News, presented visual evidence. Right-wing influencers spread Trump's ridiculous lie. Those are the people I worry about most — those who believe everything they see and hear, as long as it originates from a source they've decided to trust because they agree with its politics or some other cultural signifier.

Evolution did not prepare us for this tsunami of digital slop. Human cognition evolved for smaller-scale, lower-volume information environments. AI deepfakes flood us with hyper-realistic, unverifiable content, overwhelming our common sense and prompting us to check out in order to stay sane. They also feed into the "liar's dividend" paradox, where the existence of deepfakes allows politicians and other liars to dismiss inconvenient facts: "That's a deepfake! Fake news!"

Polls show that Americans (and citizens of other countries) are tuning out the news and social media because they do not know what to believe. Only 25% of Americans trust what they see on the news, a record low.

Our situation is not without precedent. Soviet citizens consumed sports scores, the weather and other apolitical content readily, but when it came to politics, they relied on rumors, personal networks, foreign and opposition broadcasts, and samizdat. Soviet citizens were not passive dupes. They were active interpreters navigating a polluted information environment, and they knew it.

What can we do? In a global news environment riddled with deepfakes, there is no alternative to the lies — we need a relatively objective extraterrestrial broadcaster with no stake in Terran affairs. Deepfake technology is improving by the day; soon that telltale "AI sheen" will disappear altogether.

Human beings are highly adaptable and require accurate, reliable information in order to conduct business and live their lives. So we will eventually figure this out.

Independent fact-checkers have largely proven ineffective in discouraging misinformation. Some that purported to be unbiased turned out to be tainted, and partisans reflexively reject truths that run against their narratives. Watermarking, cryptographic signatures and mandatory disclosures for AI-generated content, however, are already emerging as warning signs that you are being exposed to artificial material. Public funding for nonpartisan journalism would help, but ironically that would require bipartisan congressional approval. We should all adopt a tone of epistemic humility. It is OK to admit that you know that you do not know, and to adopt a wait-and-see attitude before reacting to an outrage that may or may not have really occurred.

Until we unravel the deepfake mess, politics in particular — and the public square in general — is going to get a lot rougher, stupider and less responsive to our wants and needs. The first step, after all, is admitting we have a problem, and we're not there yet.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

Photo credit: Samuel Regan-Asante at Unsplash