We need a ‘Stop, Drop, and Roll’ PSA for the AI age

With visual truth shattered forever and zero self-regulation by the tech industry, it’s time to educate people, hard.

That’s the sentence I see with every AI-generated Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube short made with Seedance 2.0. And yes, we are. The walls of reality have finally vanished, sucked in by a black hole of Nvidia chips. So I’m going to Nancy Reagan the hell out of everyone and demand a global public service announcement like that old “Just Say No” to drugs campaign, which was everywhere when I was growing up.

We need Mr. T back to make young and old fools listen up, because the companies printing money with their generative video tech are doing zilch to fix the planetary problem they have created.

The message? Everyone should stop believing everything that moves online. Or at least question it all with a critical mind. All the time.

It will be hard. Probably impossible. The instant satisfaction of buying into whatever candy social media throws at us, algorithmically tuned to support our preconceived ideas, is too much to resist. We want to believe because dopamine is so yummy. And the digital overlords of Silicon Valley and Beijing know it. That’s why they have officially trampled our already fragile grasp on the truth with the release of models capable of manufacturing clips that are indistinguishable from physical life.

AI models like ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 can wolf down up to a dozen reference files—images, audio tracks, and camera movement samples—to flawlessly synthesize an alternate reality with no uncanny valley. And it costs only pennies do so.

We have effectively handed the keys to the multiverse to any basement-dwelling sociopath with a Wi-Fi connection. Tal Hagin, an information warfare analyst, told Euronews exactly where we stand: “We are no longer at the stage where it’s six months away. We are already there: unable to identify what’s AI and what’s not.”

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