The fear of machines taking over has been an overused movie trope for a long time. We live in a society where technology is so advanced and prevalent in our daily lives that we must always question what we see online. However, it has become increasingly difficult to spot authentic human content thanks to an uprising in hyper-realistic videos created by Sora, an Artificial Intelligence company.
Students have mixed reactions to the artificially generated videos flooding their social media pages, including animals, babies, and well known figures behaving in exaggerated, bizarre ways, as if their actions are not their own. Some find these videos to be unsettling and dislike interacting with them because they mimic human emotion, despite not being real.
“I usually skip the videos when I realize that it’s AI. It’s kind of scary in a way,” freshman Giuliana Scala said.
However, not every student avoids these videos. Instead, some embrace them. For some, these videos are not a foreshadowing to the eerie future of the machines ‘taking over’, but a source of entertainment, especially when they illustrate familiar celebrities or animals doing silly or ridiculous actions.
“Sometimes I watch AI videos because some of them are funny,” freshman Natalie Rogala said. “They’re usually Jake Paul or animals behaving unusually. There’s videos of squirrels eating ramen.”
Many students recognize that while they might not share the same opinions, age plays a significant role in how easily someone can identify which videos are AI generated. They connect younger generations, bringing more able to instinctively spot the fake videos compared to older audiences because they have not yet formed the habits of doing so.
“I think at our age, a lot of people do know that it’s AI, but my grandma falls for AI a lot. I think it’s just technology evolving. We’ve kinda grown up with Sora stuff now, and they haven’t,” senior Amelia Banevicius said.
The uncertainty of whether to trust videos holds more consequences than simply confusing strangers online. As AI videos become more realistic, the line between fact and fiction is blurred, causing misinformation to be considered true in most cases.
“If I didn’t know that it was AI generated I probably wouldn’t instantly recognize it because it’s so realistic,” English teacher John Waite said. “That is actually pretty scary to me because if we can’t trust the things that we see, how are we going to make judgments on how we respond to things in the world? I think that AI created videos degrade our ability to understand or know the truth, and if we don’t know the truth then we could fall victim to all kinds of propaganda.”
Many of these concerns extend into the future of creative work. Some worry that as AI becomes more common in media and advertising, automated tools could reshape entire industries and the people behind them. One major example of this is AI country music artist Breaking Rust’s song, “Walk My Walk” reaching the very top of Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart Nov. 8. Similarly, one of Coca-Cola’s latest official commercials, “Holidays are Coming”, has visuals fabricated using AI tools.
“I ignore AI as a creative person. I’m not interested in the machine doing the work for me. There’s being efficient and then there’s allowing so much control to the mechanisation that I feel detached from the work,” Fine Arts teacher Marty Voelker said. “I think that there’s going to be a niche market for hand made craftsmanship. When the digital photo era came along, people would pay a lot of money for hand developed prints from a dark room. There are people that will seek out handmade art because of the fact that it’s not produced through AI.”
In the end, some educators say that their biggest concern isn’t the AI, but it’s unreliability and falsehoods that it promotes. In a world where fake videos are indistinguishable from real ones, the repercussions go far beyond social media alone.
“Deepfake videos that are hyper-realistic definitely have the potential to cause many, many problems because people maybe can’t distinguish between what’s true and what’s not true,” Waite said. “They could make bad decisions based on faulty understanding of the world.”
