Deepfakes: It's All Maya
Maya conceals Brahmn, the absolute Reality, from us as it has the power of entangling consciousness and concealing things; it projects the unreal as real and vice versa. It can also create bondage to the empirical world. Deceptive in character, maya is called avidya, false knowledge.
Adi Shankara stated that Brahmn alone is real, and the unreal, illusory world resides in Brahmn like the illusion of a snake in the rope. What is Satyam, real, is eternal and unchanging, and what is unreal is ephemeral, transient and changing — mithya. Brahmn satyam, jagat mithya, propounded the great seer.
Even as we elevate ourselves spiritually to act upon the cautionary note of Shankara, we are confronted with a new maya — deepfakes. They have taken the world by storm. They are faking images, audio and video. The video images, pieces of art and writings are all dodging our perception. Driven by generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, deepfakes erode our trust in our perception.
The new maya, the deepfakes, manipulates us by upending our sensory perceptions through which we comprehend the empirical world. This seems like a subset of an illusion of false knowledge within the cosmic illusion. A maya within maya!
Here, neti neti — not this, not that — an Upanishadic sutra advocated by Shankara to find spiritual truth, may also help cultivate an inquiring and analytical mind and unveil the truth in the perceived world.
