The Head-Swap That Started It All

Picture this: It's the 1860s, and an artist named Thomas Hicks wants to create a heroic portrait of Abraham Lincoln. But instead of painting from life, he does something audacious, he literally cuts Lincoln's head from a photograph and pastes it onto the body of John C. Calhoun, a senator whose politics Lincoln opposed. The composite becomes wildly popular. Nobody notices Lincoln's mole has mysteriously switched sides of his face. It takes decades before anyone calls out the fake.

I've been thinking about this story a lot lately, especially as I watch deepfake videos of world leaders proliferate across my social feeds. That crude cut-and-paste job from the 1860s feels quaint now, almost innocent. Today, we're witnessing something fundamentally different—not just in scale, but in what it means for how we understand truth itself.

Welcome to the Synthetic Campaign Trail

We've crossed a threshold. The 2024 U.S. election wasn't just another campaign cycle; it was our first real taste of industrialized synthetic politics. When New Hampshire voters received those AI-generated robocalls mimicking President Biden's voice, telling them to stay home during the primary, we weren't just seeing a dirty trick. We were watching the democratisation of deception.

Think about what's changed: Creating that fake Lincoln portrait required artistic skill, specialised equipment, and time. Today? A laptop, some software, and maybe twenty minutes. The barriers to entry for political manipulation have essentially evaporated.

But here's what really keeps me up at night: It's not just that these tools exist. It's that they're getting boring. We're becoming numb to the extraordinary. "Oh, another deepfake of a politician? Must be Tuesday."

The Global Laboratory of Synthetic Democracy

What fascinates me most is how different countries are serving as unwitting test subjects for different flavors of AI manipulation:

In Australia, scammers didn't just stop at political deepfakes—they pivoted straight to fraud. Imagine scrolling YouTube and seeing your Prime Minister (speaking inexplicably with an American accent) promising you $850 a day through some investment scheme. The synthetic and the criminal have merged, and our legal systems are still catching up to analog robocalls.

Indonesia took things in an even wilder direction: They resurrected a dead dictator. The Golkar Party's deepfake videos of Suharto endorsing candidates from beyond the grave garnered millions of views. Yes, they labeled them as AI-generated, but does that matter when the emotional impact has already landed? When you can make the dead speak, what happens to political legacy? To history itself?

The United States gave us the full spectrum: from those Biden robocalls to the RNC's fully AI-generated dystopian advertisement, complete with fictional footage of China invading Taiwan. We're not just faking what politicians say anymore, we're fabricating entire alternate realities and calling them campaign ads.

The Paradox That We Shouldn't Ignore

Here's the thing that really gets me: The more sophisticated our fakes become, the more we lose the ability to believe anything is real. It's a peculiar kind of epistemic collapse. When everything could be synthetic, nothing feels fully authentic.

I guess you could call this the "deepfake paradox," and it works in two devastating ways:

First, it provides cover for actual wrongdoing. Caught on tape saying something damaging? Just claim it's a deepfake. The mere possibility of synthetic media becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card for genuine misconduct.

Second, it breeds a kind of exhausted nihilism. When you can't trust your eyes and ears, when every piece of evidence requires forensic analysis, many people simply check out. Why bother engaging with politics if you can't tell what's real?

The Human Element We're Forgetting

In all our hand-wringing about technology (guilty as charged), we're missing something crucial: This isn't really about AI. It's about us. About what we're willing to believe, what we want to be true, and how desperately we crave narratives that confirm our existing beliefs.

The most successful deepfakes aren't the most technically sophisticated—they're the ones that tell us stories we're already primed to accept. That fake video of Tim Walz? It spread because some people wanted to believe it. Those resurrection videos of Suharto? They resonated because they tapped into genuine political nostalgia.

We're not just victims of synthetic media; we're accomplices in its spread.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I don't have neat answers, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But I keep coming back to that Lincoln portrait from the 1860s. It reminds me that humans have always hungered for compelling political imagery, even when we have to fabricate it. The technology changes, but the impulse remains constant.

What feels different now is the velocity and volume. We're not dealing with one carefully crafted fake that takes decades to debunk. We're drowning in a tsunami of synthetic content, each wave eroding our shared foundation of facts a little more.

Maybe the question isn't how we stop the fakes—that ship has sailed. Maybe it's how we learn to swim in this new ocean of uncertainty. How do we maintain democratic discourse when we can't agree on what's real? How do we hold leaders accountable when any evidence can be dismissed as artificial?

At Mymmic, we're developing detection tools to help navigate these murky waters, because while we can't stop the tide of synthetic content, we can at least help people recognize when they're swimming in it. Democracy depends on our ability to distinguish truth from manipulation, and that starts with knowing what we're looking at.