When digital forensics expert Hany Farid first began studying manipulated media two decades ago, fake content was easier to detect. Today, that landscape has shifted with a speed that Farid describes as “breathtaking.” In just the last one to two years, he says, we’ve moved from an era where a computer takes seconds or minutes to produce a static file to "full-blown interactive deepfakes" that can hold a live conversation in real time.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, discusses the rapidly accelerating landscape of generative AI and the unique threat that it poses to our collective understanding of the world.

Farid notes that tools once reserved for governments or well-funded organizations are now freely available, radically expanding the threat landscape. “We have taken a mechanism that was in the hands of state-sponsored actors and bad actors and given it to 8 billion people in the world," he says. This democratization of powerful technology makes it much easier to create convincing false images, audio and video — and much harder to trust what we see online.

And he explains that human perception is no longer a reliable defense, as his research shows people are only slightly better than chance at identifying AI-generated content.

To reduce the damage, Farid suggests solutions should focus on the systems that profit from harmful content, including platforms and ad networks that help it spread. He also gives a warning about news consumption: “Stop getting your news from social media. That’s not what it was designed for.”

Despite the rise of deepfakes and online deception, Farid says he rejects the idea that there is no truth or fact. He believes that, although it takes effort, people can still work together to understand what is happening in the world.

This lecture, which took place on March 13, was part of LNS 110: Brilliance of Berkeley, a course featuring distinguished researchers working on the world’s most pressing issues.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small.

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When William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, the power of London’s theater lived almost entirely in language. The stage was mostly bare and the scenery imagined. To mark a shift in setting, an actor might simply declare, “This is the Forest of Arden.”

But by the mid-17th century, this mode of performance began to change.

Following decades of civil war and Puritan rule, King Charles II’s 1660 restoration of the monarchy reopened public theaters that had been closed for nearly two decades. It marked the beginning of the Restoration era, when movable scenery debuted — massive painted flats slid along wooden grooves, transforming the stage in seconds — and women, immigrants, servants and enslaved people first moved across it as performers and stagehands. The English stage became a space of motion, a vivid counterpart to a London rebuilt after the 1665 plague and the Great Fire of 1666.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, UC Berkeley Professor Julia Fawcett discusses her 2025 book Moveable Londons: Performance and the Modern City, which traces how this mechanical innovation echoed a deeper cultural one. It was, she says, a “revolution in English performance” that redefined movement, agency and belonging in a rapidly changing city.

And that revolution, she contends, provided the template not only for modern theater’s moving sets, star actresses and illusionistic stages, but also for ways of moving through — and belonging in — the modern city.

Fawcett’s talk, which took place on Feb. 11, 2025, was part of a Berkeley Book Chats event hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities. She was in conversation with Joshua Gang, an associate professor of English at Berkeley.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Image from Moveable Londons book cover.

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At age 10, Omar Yaghi walked into a school library in Amman, Jordan, and opened a book that changed his life. He saw molecular drawings — complex structures he didn’t yet understand, but which immediately captivated him. "I thought I discovered something that nobody had ever seen before," Yaghi recalls.

Yaghi, now a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, shared this story during a recent Brilliance of Berkeley lecture to illustrate how a life defined by scarcity can be transformed through the pursuit of science.

Growing up in a family of 10 children, Yaghi lived in a single room that lacked electricity and running water. The family shared their living quarters with cattle, separated from the animals only by sacks of feed. Education was the family's singular priority; his parents spent everything they earned to keep their children in school to ensure they had a path toward a different future.

In 2025, Yaghi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs — porous materials that act like "molecular sponges" capable of capturing carbon dioxide from the air and harvesting water from desert humidity.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Yaghi describes how his childhood as a refugee and his early days as an immigrant in the U.S. shaped his relentless work ethic. He recounts the "failure" of a yearlong graduate school experiment that actually resulted in his first major discovery: a ball-shaped molecule that paved the way for his career. Today, his research on reticular chemistry continues to push toward real-world solutions to the climate crisis.

For Yaghi, science is not only about discovery, but about transforming access to life’s most basic resource. “My dream,” he says, is “for everyone to have water independence — where your water is yours, independent of everything else.”

This lecture, which took place on Jan. 23, was part of LNS 110: Brilliance of Berkeley, a course featuring distinguished researchers working on the world’s most pressing issues.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small for UC Berkeley.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.