This is a photograph taken at the finishing line of the Brompton World Championship in 2016 as Mark Emsley clinched victory ahead of his rivals. To the casual observer, it looks as if the chap on the far left was charging in to a sixth place finish.

Well, I can promise you he wasn’t.

How do I know? Because that fella on the left was me, dear reader. The reality of this image is that I had just been lapped by the eventual winners. But who cares – why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

Fair enough, a lot of good stories are harmless, told to get us to buy this product or watch that new film. But there are times when it all becomes a good deal more sinister.

In 2024, the issue of whether we can believe all that we see is going to be important, not least because this promises to be a world record year, as 64 countries (that’s around 49% of the world’s population) hold elections.

We need to be able to trust what we see, and as AI creeps into our lives this is becoming harder and harder. Just last month more than 100 deepfake videos of Rishi Sunak were removed from Facebook. And this is the ones that have been caught; who knows how many more slip through the net of the various social media giants.

So the onus is on us all, to use AI responsibly and think before we hit ‘forward’ on that too-good-to-be-true video on social…