Every piece of contested evidence—every video, every audio, every document—will be challenged as synthetic. And here's the thing: the challengers won't be wrong to ask. The tools to fake are cheap. The tools to verify are expensive and slow. Courts will face a choice: accept evidence they can't authenticate, or reject evidence they can't disprove.

What happens when ground truth itself becomes a litigation question?

This isn't about one party or one candidate. It's about whether the epistemic infrastructure of democracy survives contact with generative AI. The authentication cliff isn't just a financial problem or a consumer protection problem. It's a governance problem. And we're walking into it without infrastructure.