Is This AI? - The Credibility Hedge, Deepfakes, and Why We Are Learning to Doubt What Is Real

A deepfake of the President hijacked a live stream that 30,000 people were watching. It took generational futurist Ryan Vet five seconds to realize it was fake. That five seconds is the whole problem.

On Father's Day, a stream-jacking deepfake interrupted the College World Series broadcast Ryan Vet was watching with his family, complete with a breaking-news chime, the President's voice, and a QR code asking viewers to send crypto. The unsettling part was not the scam. It was how convincing it was, and how the same suspicion is now aimed at everything real. In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show, generational futurist, USA TODAY bestselling author, and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet unpacks what he calls the credibility hedge: the reflex to dismiss the source instead of engaging with the substance, and what it costs us when skepticism stops being wisdom and starts becoming a cop-out.

Key Takeaways

• On Father's Day, a deepfake of the President stream-jacked a live College World Series broadcast in front of roughly 30,000 viewers. It took Ryan three to five seconds to know it was fake, and he teaches deepfake defense for a living.
• Trust is at a historic low. Nearly 7 in 10 people worry that institutional leaders are deliberately misleading the public, with the sharpest decline in national government and major news (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2026).
• The circle of trust is shrinking. Confidence is concentrating among the people closest to us, our coworkers, neighbors, and families, and pulling away from institutions.
• We have doubted reality before. Photoshop made us question photos. Instagram filters made us question beauty. One study of 18,000-plus "no filter" posts found about 12% had actually used a filter (Santarossa et al., 2017). Now AI makes us question almost everything.
• The credibility hedge: calling something "AI slop" often protects the skeptic more than it judges the content. "No filter" was a badge that proved a photo was real. "AI slop" is becoming the inverse badge that proves skepticism is real.
• Two forces from psychology drive it: epistemic vigilance, the constant calibration of who to trust (Sperber et al., 2010), and source derogation, attacking where something came from instead of what it actually said.
• What AI cannot replace is human direction. In one large organization, employees could recite the mission but not say where the company was going. Clear vision and clear leadership, one human to another, is what rebuilds trust.

Research and Sources Cited

• Edelman (2026), 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust amid insularity
• Sperber, Clement, Heintz, Mascaro, Mercier, Origgi, and Wilson (2010) on epistemic vigilance, in Mind and Language
• Santarossa, Coyne, and Woodruff (2017) on #nofilter images that actually used a filter
• Fransen, Smit, and Verlegh (2015) on strategies and motives for resistance to persuasion (source derogation)
• The Ritz-Carlton motto: "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen"
• Ryan's AI course, From Human Hesitation to AI Acceleration, and his related essay The Velocity Gap: Gen Z's Contradiction with AI

Connect with Ryan Vet

• Read the full Collide essay: https://ryanvet.com/collide/is-this-ai/
• Subscribe to the Collide newsletter: https://ryanvet.com/collide
• Learn more and book Ryan to speak: https://ryanvet.com

About Ryan Vet

Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold.

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Transcript

Ryan Vet 0:00

On this episode of the Ryan Vett Show, our country has moved to a place of historically low trust. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, nearly seven out of ten people now worry that institutional leaders are deliberately misleading the public. Trust has declined the most in national government leaders and major news organizations, while it has become more concentrated among people closer to us co-workers, our neighbors, and our families. In other words, the circle of trust is getting smaller. And if you look at Gen Z and millennials in particular, the distrust appears even more pronounced. And Mao, a reading from Ryan Vett's newsletter, Collide. Is this AI? We've gotten so good at doubting that we're doubting the real things. Now it's starting to cost us. AI slop, the comment read, complete with the rolling on the floor laughing emoji. It was the second nearly identical comment I had received. Ironically, it was posted by what appeared to be a bot account. The comment on a YouTube video of a podcast interview and excerpt had nothing to do with artificial intelligence, nor did it have anything remotely AI-ish in the conversation or visuals. The illusion of potential AI usage is sowing seeds of distrust in devastating ways. Before these bot comments, I received a real text from a real colleague. I had sent a video out to all of my partners and sponsors prior to a major event I hosted a few weeks back. The text came in, is this video you include in these partner emails AI? LOL? In fact, it was not AI at all. The date stamp on the video is actually several years old, long before video AI could have produced that level of video quality. The video was of me speaking off the cuff, then edited together to cut back on some of my rambling. Both of these accusations revealed a larger pattern. I started thinking. People initially question and distrust the content they receive, even if they know the sender or the content is genuinely authentic. We are all questioning things every day. Is the person answering the phone real? Or is it AI? Is the video that my business partner sends me AI? Is this newsletter that you're reading or listening to right now AI? It's not. A deep fake on Father's Day. On Father's Day, this all came to a head. We decided to spend the afternoon at home together as a family. My family was sitting on the couch watching the UNC vs. Oklahoma NCAA Men's College World Series. I stepped away to the kitchen to refill my water and get a snack. All of a sudden, I heard the breaking news chime with an announcer saying that the broadcast was being interrupted for an urgent message from the President of the United States. Then the voice of Donald Trump. I came running back to our family room to hear the president urgently say something so significant had happened to shape American history that he needed to interrupt all broadcasts. At first, my eyes were glued to the screen, wondering if the US had just nuked somebody or a major politician had died or what news was so important that it would interrupt the stream. President Trump continued his message with very similar speech patterns and rhetoric that Trump would use, making it almost believable. Then I noticed a strange QR code in the bottom right corner and the URL, and the president started asking us to transfer money to his crypto wallets. I'm ashamed to admit that it took me three to five seconds to realize that I was watching a deep fake. We were part of the latest stream jacking campaign by hackers trying to get people to give them money, me and almost 30,000 people watching the live UNC Oklahoma stream on that YouTube channel. What's most embarrassing, I'll admit, is that when I present my AI course from human hesitation to AI acceleration, I used a similar tactic, leveraging deep fakes as an illustration to warn against them. And yet here I was, for a split second, mesmerized. Then the curious side of me didn't switch off the fake stream. I continued to watch for another 30 seconds or so, analyzing the quality of this AI deep fake and trying to understand the ruse. What was concerning to me is how incredibly convincing the video was, and it's not happening in a vacuum. Our country has moved to a place of historically low trust. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, nearly seven out of ten people now worry that institutional leaders are deliberately misleading the public. Trust has declined the most in national government leaders and major news organizations, while it has become more concentrated among people closer to us co-workers, our neighbors, and our families. In other words, the circle of trust is getting smaller. And if you look at Gen Z and millennials in particular, the distrust appears even more pronounced. That matters because these are the generations coming out of an age, building companies, leading teams, consuming media, and deciding what they believe is real or not. We have learned to doubt reality before. It takes me back to the early days of social media where we overfiltered our images. We posted only the best photos. We were selective in showing people the best part of our lives. More recently, social media has moved towards volume and more authentic content rather than carefully curated feeds that dotted millennials' early social media years. We used to question millennials' feeds for accuracy and authenticity. Now we are taking that same skepticism and directing it at nearly every piece of content or interaction, and it's dangerous. Everywhere we turn, was that person that just answered the call real or AI? Is that the president of the United States or deepfake? Is that video of the kid wrestling the crocodile and winning real or AI? For many years in my life, I took April Fool's jokes seriously, too seriously, as if it was the most important day of the year. I remember back in the early days of Facebook, I photoshopped myself with a shaved head and put it as my profile picture. The comment section went wild. That level of photo manipulation did not widely exist on the internet at that point in time. There was little attention paid to the date of the calendar or questioning the photo's veracity. Within a few short years, I was no longer the only kid in school with access to Photoshop on my personal computer. YouTube videos taught others how to manipulate photos for fun. That same prank just two years later would have been riddled with people asking, is that photoshopped? We saw the same thing on Instagram. People questioned, what filter did you use? Which compelled people to begin using the hashtag on Instagram, hashtag no filter, because the photo was just so naturally beautiful, and people challenged it and did not believe it. It is almost as if we did not believe beauty could be that real. And to be fair, sometimes the suspicion was earned. One study of more than 18,000 no filter posts found that about 12% actually used a filter. So this is not completely new. Photoshop made us question photos. Filters made us question beauty. Now AI is making us question almost everything. The credibility hedge. In writing this, I came across a couple of ideas from psychology that help me put words to what I think is happening. The first is called epistemic vigilance. The basic idea is that because we depend on what other people tell us, we are constantly calibrating how much we should trust the information coming at us. We are always asking, even if subconsciously, is this person credible? Is this information reliable? Is this true? The second idea is source derogation. Instead of engaging with what was actually said, we dismiss where it came from. We attack the source. We wave it off. And that is the lower effort move. You do not have to wrestle with the substance if you can dismiss the source. Put those together and you get what I call a credibility hedge. Calling something AI slop is not always a real judgment about the content. Sometimes it is a way to protect yourself. If it turns out to be AI, you called it. If it turns out not to be AI, you can always say, well, it just felt off. No filter was a badge people wore to prove the photo was real. AI slop is becoming the inverse badge. It is a badge people wear to prove their skepticism is real. And that is what concerns me. Because at some point, skepticism stops being wisdom and starts becoming a cop-out. Is what you are creating human? Because I've been involved around AI and automation for more than a decade, I often have people reach out wanting my take on how to build something with AI. Two friends in particular were especially focused on riding the AI wave into the next dot com boom. And to be clear, I get it. There is real opportunity here, but in their pursuit to each build out their new billion dollar company with AI, there was a fatal flaw. They were trying to build an enterprise using crank down content to make them rich. In doing so, they forgot the human part of the business. One of my favorite mantras in all of business comes from the Ritz Carlton. We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. The idea of one human serving another is not going away anytime soon. As humans, we long for that connection and community. And quite frankly, that human connection is the core of any business, regardless of what you sell. While plenty of people are making money off AI content, faceless videos, ebooks, social media, and all of that, there is still one thing that wins. It has always won. Is what you are creating human? That is why the two AI slop comments made me pause and rewatch the videos. Was my voice not clear enough? Were my opinions not original enough? Was there something about the tone that felt manufactured? Or was it just truly a bot trolling the internet? I think it was probably the latter. But when one of my actual sponsors looked at a real video that goes to all of my sponsoring partners and wondered if it was AI, even though it was not an AI video at all, that made me ask a harder question. What does that say about me? What does that say about my voice? What does that say about the moment we are in? Maybe nothing, or maybe it says everything. Knowing where you are going. You see, as leaders, we are in an interesting time where trust is eroding and we must figure out how to rebuild trust. It could actually be simpler than we think. At the end of the day, we need an authentic voice. We have to have our own convictions and we have to know where we are going. I was sitting with a large organization and some of their senior leaders in a meeting the other day. They had come to the realization that most people in their organization could not definitively say where the company was going. Nearly every employee and even stakeholder could recite their mission statement as it was plastered all over this organization's walls and materials. Those in the organization knew what they did and did it every day, but they were so much in the daily grind that they did not know where they were going. That direction had drifted somewhere in the last several years. I think that is true beyond the walls of this one group. I think we have sped up our work, produced more content, created things more quickly, offloaded so much to technology and automation, and have made things more efficient that somewhere in all of it, we have lost track of vision and where we are going and what is most important in life. And as a leader, I think that is where we need to lead. Could everyone say where your organization is going? Could they definitively say where you are leading them? Could they articulate the value that you add for your clients or your stakeholders and detail the difference that you make? Because that is what cannot be replaced with AI. Clear direction, clear vision, and clear leadership from one human being to another. Thank you so much for listening to this reading of Collide. Until next time, I'm Ryan. Thanks for tuning in to the Ryan Vet Show. Be sure to subscribe, comment, and like this episode. Plus, share it with someone who needs to hear it.