Just a few weeks ago, an artificial intelligence research group backed by Elon Musk announced they'd invented "deepfakes for text". An AI system is fed some lines of writing, anything from George Orwell to a newspaper article about Brexit, and writes the next few sentences based on its assessment of what should come next. Its creators have said that it is too dangerous to release. Based on the examples released to the press, which possess nothing of the clipped strangeness traditionally associated with machine writing, you can see why.

But there's also an argument that we need to be exposed to the startling capabilities of AI before it's too late. That's why Phillip Wang, the Uber engineer, built the faces website. "I have decided to dig into my own pockets and raise some public awareness for this technology," he wrote on – of all things – Facebook.

Wang may have performed an important public service. It's impossible to spend any amount of time on his site and not feel a distinct sense of unease. Your mind starts to play tricks as it searches for, even insists on, the familiar: Hey, maybe I know that person! Isn't that …? Eventually, more profound and unsettling questions present themselves.

Our face is our in-built calling card, we've also structured our society around it: the driver's licence, that default identity document, would be nothing without a photo. Try crossing an international border without an official inspecting your mug. And now we all carry a camera around in our pockets 24/7, our faces have become the proof that we exist in a place. Just consider the rise of the selfie, and then of Instagram.

It's become almost trite to observe that the real world has been superseded by the virtual. But with the rise of increasingly sophisticated AI technology, perhaps it's now more accurate to say that the real world is being threatened by the fake.