Deepfakes and the Infocalypse: What You Urgently Need to Know

Nina Schick — an adviser to political leaders, technology companies, and media organisations on AI and synthetic media — was among the first to bring sustained public attention to the threat posed by deepfakes and AI-generated synthetic media. Published in 2020, before the current wave of generative AI tools made synthetic media creation accessible to anyone, the book identified with striking prescience the trajectory along which the technology was developing and the information environment implications of that trajectory.

Schick's core concept — the "infocalypse," a future state in which the production of convincing fake audio, video, and images becomes so cheap and easy that the evidentiary value of all media is undermined — has proved influential in policy circles and has shaped how governments and platforms have begun to think about synthetic media governance. For practitioners advising clients on emerging information threats, the book provides both a technically accessible introduction to deepfake technology and a framework for thinking about its second and third-order effects on trust, verification, and institutional credibility. An important early warning that has not lost its urgency.