Not to sound too much like Kamala Harris during one of her peregrinations on the nature of time, but the thing about the future is that it catches up with you awfully fast.

For a while we have been warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the special hazards of ‘deepfakes’. It seemed so futuristic when we saw a deepfake of Barack Obama some years ago, which demonstrated how easy it was to put words into someone’s mouth that they did not say. Well, now we have had an example in real time. Or at least the electorate in Turkey have.

Personally I am not persuaded that Turkey’s election was ever likely to be entirely fair and free. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said that democracy is like a tram: you take it until it gets you to your destination – the destination, presumably, being such a time as elections become unnecessary. Never-theless the country did go through the election process this week. And despite a surprisingly knife-edge result, the most interesting thing was actually what happened a few days before the election, when a sex tape was released featuring one of the candidates – Muharrem Ince. The candidate immediately denounced the tape as a ‘deepfake’.

I should stress at this point that I have not gone online to search out the tape in question and assess its provenance. All I do know is the candidate was swift to cite ‘deepfake’ in his defence. And not just deepfake, but dastardly, Israeli-originated deepfake. Ince was not content with simply denying the tape was real: it had to be the work of the Israelis.

This is a popular and common enough move in Turkey, as it is across much of the Islamic world. Get into a spot of bother and you can always claim that the Israelis are to blame. Some readers might remember that moment some years ago when Lord Ahmed of Rotherham killed a man on the M1 by accidentally hitting the victim’s crashed car just after he had been texting. Lord Ahmed received a short prison sentence for dangerous driving and subsequently cropped up on television in his native Pakistan explaining to an interviewer that his conviction had been overturned. (It hadn’t.) And that his harsh sentencing had, in fact, been down to the Jews. Lord Ahmed declined to elaborate on this point. In any case, this was explanation enough for Pakistani television. Though sadly for Lord Ahmed he could not blame the Jews when he was convicted some years later of child sexual abuse.

But I digress. Turkey’s presidential candidate seems to have imagined that hinting that the purported sex tape was not just a deepfake, but an Israeli deepfake, would go down well with the Turkish public. The tape was released just before the final polls. And in the candidate’s opinion this was a shame, because Ince – who also ran in the 2018 election in Turkey – said that he was offering Turkey ‘a third option, a third way’.

Instead of being able to offer the Turkish people this third way of doing things, though, poor Ince had to pull out – of the race that is. And it is probably all for the good. Because at present a couple of days is not enough for the world to determine whether a sex tape is the real article or a piece of mischief-making. I pity the candidate who would want to try to prove this point. After all, there are only two ways in which you can really get absolved in such a matter and have it swing in your favour.

The first is to invite the entire voting public to view the sex tape and decide for themselves whether it is the genuine article or not. The other is to have some sort of press conference, with an overhead projector and perhaps one of those laser pointer jobbies, the better to point to those portions of the tape which should be viewed with particular suspicion by the voting public.

My point is that this could be seen as almost the epitome of a lose-lose situation. Whichever way you go, you are merely solidifying the question of ‘sex’ and ‘tape’ in the minds of the voting public. Not something which is likely to be a vote-winner, unless you happen to look an awful lot like a swimwear model (which Ince does not). And quite possibly not even then.

But somewhere within this sorry modern tale is a deeper lesson. In recent years I have commented with some regularity that the treadmill of technological progress on which we are running is going at too high a speed for our legs to keep carrying us. Even before the era of deepfakes we were at risk of being thrown off the treadmill. Now perhaps we are indeed at the throwing-off stage.

For how is a voting public to know what is true and what is not? If something in any way scandalous dropped before an election in a more developed democracy, how would we be able to know whether the material was true or not? Would we trust our intelligence services to tell us? Would Americans?

How would a candidate be able to undo any damage that had been done in time to keep themselves in the running? And how to discern the difference between an unscrupulous candidate who is willing to say any old thing to get himself out of a tricky situation and actual deepfake interference? The public at large have enough difficulty agreeing on the first of these two, never mind with the additional challenge of the second.

I do not know how this will go. All I do know is that while Muharrem Ince no longer has to prepare for government, the lesson of his abortive political career is that we should try to prepare for the future that has already arrived.