This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Professor Hany Farid, one of the founding figures of digital forensics and one of the most authoritative voices in the world on authenticating images, video, audio and information itself.

Hany is an applied mathematician and computer scientist. He spent twenty years at Dartmouth, eight at UC Berkeley, and is now back at Dartmouth. For twenty five years he has developed the techniques used by media outlets, law enforcement and courts of law to determine what is real and what is not. He has advised regulators, worked on countering online terrorism and child sexual abuse material, and been asking ”who benefits” since long before it was fashionable.

Filmed in our new London studio, this conversation cuts through more of the current AI and social media narrative in ninety minutes than most think pieces do in a year. Hany's argument is direct. If you are getting the majority of your news and information from social media, you should stop.

Topics covered:

• The 10 to 1 ratio of AI fake content to real reporting in every major world event
• Why disinformation is cheap and information is expensive
• The Silicon Valley trillionaire race and what it means for you
• The Grok example – Elon Musk hard-coding his own AI to protect his reputation
• Why LLMs may be worse than social media for consolidating ideas
• The Palo Alto paradox – billionaires banning screens from their own kids' classrooms
• The airplane question – would you get on it if the engineers did not understand it
• Hany's practical advice on deleting apps, using AI properly, and rebalancing life