Zendaya Rocks the Red Carpet—But Is That Even Zendaya? The Age of AI Doubles

Max Sterling, 12/16/2025 Pixels, drones, and dirty uniforms: from AI-faked firefights on Facebook to very real Ukrainian "sea babies" torpedoing Russian subs, the online battlefield now mirrors the chaos of the real one. Truth ducks for cover as the front lines shift—in every sense—deeper into the digital fog.

Let’s rewind to December, when the ancient land dispute between Thailand and Cambodia found its way not just onto battlefield dirt, but into the pixelated theater of the virtual world. A Facebook reel, apparently filmed in a sunken bunker, zipped around: Khmer soldiers, the text solemnly declared, were about to eat their last meal. The camera trailed through the gloom, flickering as if borrowed from a mid-budget war flick shot by a sleep-deprived intern. Cue an explosion—sort of. Strangely, nothing but a puff and a shudder. No crater, no panicked movement, just a weird mechanical jerk in the video, like a stop-motion test gone wrong. Even the supposedly ominous badge on a uniform squared off instead of rounding out—a clue that would have sent costume designers into fits.

Enter AFP and their digital forensics. They ran the strange clip through Hive Moderation’s AI detector. The result? A “99 percent” match for deepfake. In this theater, the set dressing comes courtesy of machine learning; nobody even bothers to hire extras, because the extras aren’t even real. The main casualties are certainty and trust, less so the flesh-and-blood kind.

Traveling east, the Black Sea is a little less surreal and a whole lot more lethal, at least for those with a taste for 21st-century naval drama. Here, things played out like the plot of a spy franchise: a Ukrainian “sea baby” kamikaze drone slipped beneath the surface and, with quiet precision, clipped the wings of Russia’s so-called “Black Hole.” We’re talking about a Varshavyanka-class submarine, a shadowy fish in the Kremlin’s pond, supposedly able to soak up sonar and melt back into the ink. Its fate? Not as cinematic as one might imagine. A single, real blast left this £300 million leviathan quietly rusting in Novorossiysk port. Replacing it will cost more than the GDP of a small island nation, and no small chunk of someone’s pride.

As for sifting fact from fiction, it’s become a profession—and a perilous one at that. Take BBC Verify, those digital sleuths crawling through viral debris after every major strike. When Ukraine lobbed a fleet of drones at Russia (or so claimed Moscow’s Ministry of Defense), the numbers were staggering: 130 shot down, 15 apparently destined for the capital. Social feeds pulsed with videos—some genuine, some suspiciously slick; airports locked down; experts huddled over grainy footage, searching for the truth that slips, eel-like, between the frames.

Verification isn’t a luxury anymore; it’s a lifeline. Consider Sydney’s tragic Hanukkah attack, which left fifteen dead. Investigators painstakingly reconstructed a real-time sequence, reading metadata like constellations, looking for clarity in the digital fog. The tiniest inconsistency—an out-of-place uniform, a video spliced one beat too smooth—becomes the thread that can unravel an entire narrative.

Returning to the physical fray at the Thailand-Cambodia border, the conflict feels less like a detatched drone war and more excruciatingly personal. Roots run deep—colonial cartography gone awry, a jittery 800-kilometer boundary, temples whose stones are older than half our legal codes. The facts, such as they are, remain distressingly tactile: at least 29 lives lost including Thai soldiers and Cambodian civilians, and around 800,000 displaced citizens. Here, humans become numbers, and numbers slip into memory almost as quickly as headlines scroll out of view.

The invisible front, though, is where reality blurs. Fake dispatches parade as frontline scoops; actual horror elbowed aside by AI-generated mayhem. Subtle mistakes in uniforms or landscape—errors that specialists spot but most viewers miss—could turn public sentiment, or worse, provide ammunition for a propaganda war without borders.

Still, some weapons do their work in undeniable ways. Ukraine’s small “sea babies” keep ambushing Russia’s fleet, slicing into the so-called shadow tankers running dodgy oil routes. Tactics evolve, and the price of embarrassment rises. Moscow’s ambitions in the Black Sea wobble, even as the world’s collective attention is constantly pulled in a dozen directions by sensational headlines and algorithmically trending hashtags.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic dance goes on—and what a clumsy waltz it is. German Chancellor Merz murmurs of “great diplomatic momentum,” although the details of any peace remain frustratingly out of reach. President Zelensky seems ready to swap NATO aspirations for the right guarantees, although cynics—of which there’s hardly a shortage this decade—might suggest these overtures are mostly for show until the last drone finds its mark.

Peering through all this noise, one question floats up: What counts as truth when the line between fact and fabrication is cut and spliced by code? Maybe it’s unfashionable to admit, but even with all this tech and all these watchdogs on the case, most people are still guessing, scrolling, looking for a headline that feels, if not true, at least convincing. Pixels don’t bleed, but trust does—and in 2025, the battle for belief is every bit as explosive as anything playing out on those ancient borderlands.

The internet—remember when it was a quirky, democratic bazaar of memes, oddball cat clips, and the kind of earnest comments that aged like milk? It’s taken on a far grimmer role as 2025 ambles on, its digital crossroads blurred by misinformation and phantom footage, especially where the machinery of war now hums.Let’s rewind to December, when the ancient land dispute between Thailand and Cambodia found its way not just onto battlefield dirt, but into the pixelated theater of the virtual world. A Facebook reel, apparently filmed in a sunken bunker, zipped around: Khmer soldiers, the text solemnly declared, were about to eat their last meal. The camera trailed through the gloom, flickering as if borrowed from a mid-budget war flick shot by a sleep-deprived intern. Cue an explosion—sort of. Strangely, nothing but a puff and a shudder. No crater, no panicked movement, just a weird mechanical jerk in the video, like a stop-motion test gone wrong. Even the supposedly ominous badge on a uniform squared off instead of rounding out—a clue that would have sent costume designers into fits.Enter AFP and their digital forensics. They ran the strange clip through Hive Moderation’s AI detector. The result? A “99 percent” match for deepfake. In this theater, the set dressing comes courtesy of machine learning; nobody even bothers to hire extras, because the extras aren’t even real. The main casualties are certainty and trust, less so the flesh-and-blood kind.Traveling east, the Black Sea is a little less surreal and a whole lot more lethal, at least for those with a taste for 21st-century naval drama. Here, things played out like the plot of a spy franchise: a Ukrainian “sea baby” kamikaze drone slipped beneath the surface and, with quiet precision, clipped the wings of Russia’s so-called “Black Hole.” We’re talking about a Varshavyanka-class submarine, a shadowy fish in the Kremlin’s pond, supposedly able to soak up sonar and melt back into the ink. Its fate? Not as cinematic as one might imagine. A single, real blast left this £300 million leviathan quietly rusting in Novorossiysk port. Replacing it will cost more than the GDP of a small island nation, and no small chunk of someone’s pride.As for sifting fact from fiction, it’s become a profession—and a perilous one at that. Take BBC Verify, those digital sleuths crawling through viral debris after every major strike. When Ukraine lobbed a fleet of drones at Russia (or so claimed Moscow’s Ministry of Defense), the numbers were staggering: 130 shot down, 15 apparently destined for the capital. Social feeds pulsed with videos—some genuine, some suspiciously slick; airports locked down; experts huddled over grainy footage, searching for the truth that slips, eel-like, between the frames.Verification isn’t a luxury anymore; it’s a lifeline. Consider Sydney’s tragic Hanukkah attack, which left fifteen dead. Investigators painstakingly reconstructed a real-time sequence, reading metadata like constellations, looking for clarity in the digital fog. The tiniest inconsistency—an out-of-place uniform, a video spliced one beat too smooth—becomes the thread that can unravel an entire narrative.Returning to the physical fray at the Thailand-Cambodia border, the conflict feels less like a detatched drone war and more excruciatingly personal. Roots run deep—colonial cartography gone awry, a jittery 800-kilometer boundary, temples whose stones are older than half our legal codes. The facts, such as they are, remain distressingly tactile: at least 29 lives lost including Thai soldiers and Cambodian civilians, and around 800,000 displaced citizens. Here, humans become numbers, and numbers slip into memory almost as quickly as headlines scroll out of view.The invisible front, though, is where reality blurs. Fake dispatches parade as frontline scoops; actual horror elbowed aside by AI-generated mayhem. Subtle mistakes in uniforms or landscape—errors that specialists spot but most viewers miss—could turn public sentiment, or worse, provide ammunition for a propaganda war without borders.Still, some weapons do their work in undeniable ways. Ukraine’s small “sea babies” keep ambushing Russia’s fleet, slicing into the so-called shadow tankers running dodgy oil routes. Tactics evolve, and the price of embarrassment rises. Moscow’s ambitions in the Black Sea wobble, even as the world’s collective attention is constantly pulled in a dozen directions by sensational headlines and algorithmically trending hashtags.Meanwhile, the diplomatic dance goes on—and what a clumsy waltz it is. German Chancellor Merz murmurs of “great diplomatic momentum,” although the details of any peace remain frustratingly out of reach. President Zelensky seems ready to swap NATO aspirations for the right guarantees, although cynics—of which there’s hardly a shortage this decade—might suggest these overtures are mostly for show until the last drone finds its mark.Peering through all this noise, one question floats up: What counts as truth when the line between fact and fabrication is cut and spliced by code? Maybe it’s unfashionable to admit, but even with all this tech and all these watchdogs on the case, most people are still guessing, scrolling, looking for a headline that feels, if not true, at least convincing. Pixels don’t bleed, but trust does—and in 2025, the battle for belief is every bit as explosive as anything playing out on those ancient borderlands.