liar's dividend
In plain wordsThe advantage dishonest people gain once everyone knows fakes are easy to make: they can wave away real evidence against them by claiming it was made by AI.
The benefit that accrues to people who deny authentic evidence, such as a genuine recording of misconduct, by exploiting public awareness that realistic deepfakesdeepfake, n.: A fake but realistic video, photo or voice recording made with AI that puts words in a real person's mouth or shows them in a scene that never happened. and other synthetic mediasynthetic media, n.: Images, video, audio or text created or substantially altered by AI rather than recorded or written directly by people, whether for art, entertainment, business or deception. exist. The more the public learns that seeing is no longer believing, the more plausible a false claim of fabrication becomes, so the harm of deepfakes includes eroding trust in real media, not only spreading fake media. Survey experiments suggest that falsely crying fake can help politicians weather scandals, particularly when the evidence is text-based, and the defense has been raised in courtrooms and election campaigns. Mitigations include provenance systems that authenticate genuine recordings at capture, forensic analysis, and verification practices in journalism.
Within an hour the candidate called the leaked audio a deepfake, a textbook play for the liar's dividend.
Origin
Coined by law professors Robert Chesney and Danielle Keats Citron in 'Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security', circulated in 2018 and published in the California Law Review in 2019.
Related
- deepfakedeepfake, n.: A fake but realistic video, photo or voice recording made with AI that puts words in a real person's mouth or shows them in a scene that never happened.
- synthetic mediasynthetic media, n.: Images, video, audio or text created or substantially altered by AI rather than recorded or written directly by people, whether for art, entertainment, business or deception.
- disinformationdisinformation, n.: Deliberate falsehoods or distortions dressed up as fact, for example from a government or campaign trying to sway an election or sow distrust.
- misinformationmisinformation, n.: False or misleading information that spreads, whether or not the people sharing it know it is wrong. AI can produce it by mistake and makes it cheaper to create.
- deepfake detectiondeepfake detection, n.: Using software, often itself AI, to tell whether a video, photo or voice recording has been faked or generated by AI rather than captured from reality.
- AI watermarkingAI watermarking, n.: Hiding an invisible signal in AI-generated text, images, audio or video so that software can later tell the content was made by AI — like a banknote's watermark, but undetectable to the eye.
Sources
- Chesney, R. & Citron, D. K. (2019). Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security. California Law Review 107, 1753–1820.
- Schiff, K. J., Schiff, D. S. & Bueno, N. S. (2025). The Liar's Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability? American Political Science Review.
Mentioned in
deepfakedeepfake, n.: A fake but realistic video, photo or voice recording made with AI that puts words in a real person's mouth or shows them in a scene that never happened., misinformationmisinformation, n.: False or misleading information that spreads, whether or not the people sharing it know it is wrong. AI can produce it by mistake and makes it cheaper to create., dead internet theorydead internet theory, n.: The idea, first a fringe conspiracy theory, that much of what we see online is now made by bots and AI rather than by real people., deepfake detectiondeepfake detection, n.: Using software, often itself AI, to tell whether a video, photo or voice recording has been faked or generated by AI rather than captured from reality., disinformationdisinformation, n.: Deliberate falsehoods or distortions dressed up as fact, for example from a government or campaign trying to sway an election or sow distrust., synthetic mediasynthetic media, n.: Images, video, audio or text created or substantially altered by AI rather than recorded or written directly by people, whether for art, entertainment, business or deception., Balenciaga PopeBalenciaga Pope, prop. n.: A 2023 AI-generated photo of Pope Francis in a stylish white puffer coat that fooled many viewers, becoming a landmark example of how convincing fake images had become.