Truth in the Age of Synthetic Media Deepfakes, Epistemic Manipulation and the Constitutional Crisis of Democracy

This article is the assertion for the interrogation of ‘When seeing is no longer believing?’ It examines the convergence of AI-generated synthetic media commonly termed "deep fakes" with the constitutional foundations. When citizens can no longer truth from fabrication, democratic discourse ceases to function. Elections lose legitimacy, journalism loses credibility, and constitutional democracies begin to suffer from what may aptly be termed an “epistemic breakdown.” In the age of synthetic media, however, this epistemic certainty has begun to collapse. Deep fakes are the hyper-realistic manipulated audio, video, or visual content generated through artificial intelligence have transformed deception from an occasional political tactic into a technologically scalable threat against democratic consciousness itself. Democracy has faced propaganda in the past, but the real problem lies in the loss of faith in reality itself. India is especially susceptible to such an occurrence.