Don't label content as fake but identify what's authentic

Earlier this month, OpenAl rolled out Sora, a short-form video app that was its first foray into social media.

- RAHUL MATTHAN

While the last thing we need is yet another algorithmically-curated, endless scroll of videos, Sora is different from its predecessors in that everything in its feed is fake—created entirely using artificial intelligence (AI). Within days of its launch, the internet was filled with reels of famous (sometimes long-deceased) people in impossible situations—winning a Nobel Prize, stealing GPUs from Target or being escorted off a plane for trying to smuggle a baby kangaroo. While many of these videos were obviously fake, others seemed disconcertingly real.

AI has gotten to the point where it is capable of excelling at just about any form of creative endeavour. I have personally used it to generate images so realistic that they are impossible to distinguish from photographs. Specialized voice-cloning technology can produce audio footage in the voice of just about anyone on the planet using nothing more than a short recording of their voice. And it has become so trivially simple to create beautiful, layered musical compositions in any genre that it feels like all that stands between me and rock stardom is a well-crafted prompt.

As much as this radical democratization of talent has been a boon for the less gifted (like me), it has resulted in a real crisis of truth. For each truly creative piece of content generated by AI, hundreds are being designed to deceive, mislead and confuse. And as AI improves and gets more believable, we are slowly sinking into a vast ocean of artificially generated content that is making it harder and harder to tell what's real and what is not.