Sad to say, but those fun videos of porch pirates getting covered in paint and such — all fake. Some staged. But mostly fake.
Same thing with most dramatic disaster clips. Nearly every one is fake. Forget the heartwarming wild animal clips. Animals don't really ask people for help. The happy exception is with seals, who actually do jump onto boats to escape killer whales. But, polar bear cubs do not. They have different habitats entirely.
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) world. Don't believe what you see or hear because anything that any person can dream up can be made into a video in minutes with AI.
Ironically, if you suspect a video is AI generated, you can always ask AI, which doesn't mind telling on itself.
Still, our reality is fragmenting.
In early era of radio and television, people of all ages gathered to watch or listen to big events. Big sports events, or a big television premiere — these were things that everyone watched, young and old. They were the talk of the water cooler the next day; The top subject at school for kids.
Today, we all watch different things. Kids have their noses stuck in their TikTok videos. Grandma is watching Facebook reels. What we see there we should not necessarily believe.
A host of studies by researchgate.net and others, suggest that a constant stream of fake videos promote widespread cynicism ("nothing is real") and low trust in all media. That can lead to a polarized, low-trust society.
Imagine what happens when juries don't trust actual, visual evidence of a crime. Or, what if a criminal argues that a real video of his criminal act is fake? Will people who are used to seeing everything as fake reject the real evidence as fake?
Yet, there is a potential for good news. People might well demand credible, verified sources of information. That could give traditional journalism a boost. Unfortunately traditional journalism has a job ahead of them. In 2025 Gallup's September 2025 poll showed that public trust of traditional journalism was at a 50-year low of 28 percent.
