"Today, faking things is getting cheaper and quicker. Meanwhile, verifying things can be expensive and slow. This asymmetry is getting worse since the reference points reporters and fact-checkers once checked against — websites, documents, public records, a voice on the phone — can now themselves be fabricated, so establishing one fact increasingly means establishing the facts beneath it. It’s a structural threat, more than any individual synthetic image. And dismissing something true is nearly free: anyone can call a genuine report machine-made, and the accusation collects a “liar’s dividend” reliably."