As fakes become more sophisticated, the real is more elusive.

At the same time, many of the things that used to provide assurance in actual institutions, procedures, ideas, practices and even real people - have been weakened with the rise of generative AI. Traditional sources of trustworthiness and confidence that things are real, have come under scrutiny.

We are experiencing a crisis of authenticity.

The question of our time is how do we understand the interaction between the real and fake in our daily lives? Even if we value the real, it has grown more difficult to define precisely what it is. In the face of this crisis of authenticity, and the ethical issues this creates, taking fakes seriously – exploring their features, where they appear and operate, might provide us to ways to understand and define what’s real.