The new TikTok trend “AI Homeless Man Prank” has sparked a wave of outrage and police responses in the United States and beyond. The prank involves using AI image generators to create realistic photos depicting fake homeless people appearing to be at someone’s door or inside their home.

Learning to distinguish between truth and falsehood is not the only challenge society faces in the AI era. We must also reflect on the human consequences of what we create.

As professors of educational technology at Laval University and education and innovation at Concordia University, we study how to strengthen human agency — the ability to consciously understand, question and transform environments shaped by artificial intelligence and synthetic media — to counter disinformation.

In one of the most viral “AI Homeless Man Prank” videos, viewed more than two million times, creator Nnamdi Anunobi tricked his mother by sending her fake photos of a homeless man sleeping on her bed. The scene went viral and sparked a wave of imitations across the country.

Two teenagers in Ohio have been charged for triggering false home intrusion alarms, resulting in unnecessary calls to police and real panic. Police departments in Michigan, New York and Wisconsin have issued public warnings that these pranks are wasting emergency resources and dehumanizing the vulnerable.

At the other end of the media spectrum, boxer Jake Paul agreed to experiment with the cameo feature of Sora 2, OpenAI’s video generation tool, by consenting to the use of his image.

But the phenomenon quickly got out of hand: internet users hijacked his face to create ultra-realistic videos in which he appears to be coming out as gay or giving make-up tutorials.

What was supposed to be a technical demonstration........

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