Liar's dividend
The liar's dividend is the advantage a wrongdoer gains when the mere existence of convincing deepfakes lets them dismiss genuine, incriminating evidence as "just a fake."
How to recognise
As synthetic media becomes more believable, it damages trust in two directions. The obvious harm is that people believe fabricated content. The subtler, more corrosive harm is the reverse: once the public knows realistic fakes are possible, any authentic recording can be waved away as fabricated. The liar profits not by producing a fake, but by exploiting the doubt that fakes create.
This is why the most durable damage from deepfakes is not any single hoax but the gradual erosion of a shared factual record — the point at which "I have it on video" stops settling anything.