Chatbots and deepfakes are eroding our shared reality

Faculty Associate Ethan Zuckerman casts a critical eye on OpenAI's Sora, an AI video generator. Owing to public backlash, OpenAI has opened itself up to requests from public figures to restrict the use of their likenesses in spoofed videos, and Zuckerman argues that the Trump era brings new challenges as the president has embraced artificially generated content, especially when AI cannot reliably determine whether a video is falsified. He ends his piece for Prospect Magazine: "With the embrace of AI video generation for political gain, it is likely that soon a major election will be influenced by imaginary imagery. Governments’ impulse may be to rein in video generation software like Sora, likely through mandatory watermarking of AI content. But such controls can easily be bypassed in open-source versions of the big AI models."