The medieval world had its own ‘deepfakes’ – church officials cited a fake imperial decree for centuries

With deepfakes on the rise, forgery and deception are often viewed as distinctly modern problems – a new era of misinformation made possible by artificial intelligence. One of the first alarming cases occurred at the start of the war in Ukraine when a doctored video appeared to show President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his soldiers to lay down their weapons.