It would be pretty tough to draw up a worse environment to try to keep American democracy together than the current one. Social media misinformation has boiled a lot of American brains. COVID broke our society in ways we are still trying to fully understand. The October 7 attack on Israel and the disturbingly overblown response, tens of thousands of dead Palestinians, and Joe Biden’s support of Israel’s actions divided Democrats. Trump’s second election has been every bit as bad as expected. Many major news outlets are not, to say the least, meeting the moment, and the Democratic response has been tepid at times.

And now, let’s throw AI into all of that.

Artificial intelligence has had quite a week, what with the Elon Musk version, Grok, getting some “tweaks” to make it less “woke.” This has created the world’s first Nazi AI. No, really. If you haven’t heard, it called itself MechaHitler among other things:

On Tuesday, Grok, the AI-chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI, began generating vile, bigoted and antisemitic responses to X users’ questions, referring to itself as “MechaHitler,” praising Hitler and “the white man,” and, as a weird side-quest, making intensely critical remarks in both Turkish and English about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as well as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The melee followed a July 4 update to Grok’s default prompts, which Musk characterized at the time as having “improved Grok significantly,” tweeting that “You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions.”

Indeed, you notice quite a difference when an AI starts spewing hateful bile when you ask it questions. Cassandra wrote more about it earlier this week. However, I am not focusing on that disturbing part of the AI story here, but instead on another part of the AI story: fake videos.

Recently, the wonderful writer Jia Tolentino published a piece in The New Yorker titled My Brain Finally Broke about AI-created online content and its danger to our society and our combined American sanity. She also appeared on Chris Hayes’ podcast Why Is This Happening, where the two of them discussed a particular example of fake videos that popped up in a friend’s Facebook timeline.

I won’t share it here because I don’t want to spread bullshit, but the video shows homeless people in tents on top of buses, with claims it is a huge problem that police are struggling to control. The tents are held on the buses by rocks. Like, 10 seconds of critical thought would tell you that this makes zero sense. Why homeless people would live on top of buses, and the idea that small rocks could hold a tent on a bus that could get up to 30-35 mph or so at times, are just two examples of why this is nonsense.

The problem is, we are in a time when critical thinking is elitist, and off-the-cuff, nonsensical opinions based on no facts are in vogue. This is especially true if you have an axe to grind or a set opinion on a certain issue. In this example, if you hate homeless people and find them disgusting, your ability to think reasonably is already compromised, so you are much more likely to believe the video and share it. The same is true for other beliefs some people hold, like police are infallible, immigrants are scary, and climate change isn’t real. Not to mention, this is going to be high paradise time for the conspiracy theory crowd.

I fear that this is not going to be limited just to the right, but people on the left will fall for these videos as well. We’ve already seen a fake AI image of Trump on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane that people shared as real. In fact, that’s another aspect of this story I want to mention: There is enough already, we don’t need fake AI crap.

We have images and video of Trump and Epstein together. In the podcast, Tolentino said that you can already see unspeakable horrors in Gaza that are real videos, and yet, we also have videos of fake atrocities that never happened, often put out there to demonize a specific group. It’s becoming harder and harder to figure out what is real.

I share Hayes’ and Tolentino’s worries about this. It’s scary to imagine where we are heading with this. If social media was the gasoline thrown on the fire started by chain emails sharing misinformation in the Aughts, then this is gasoline for social media. The idea that anyone can create a fake video using Google’s Veo AI video generator by entering a few prompts is deeply concerning, especially in light of how easily many are suckered into believing them.

Beyond the politics, I wonder how this might even affect personal relationships. People often lose their minds if you point out something they shared is wrong or fake, even if you do it as kindly as possible. In social situations, complete bullshit has the advantage, and God help anyone who politely says, “Well, actually that’s not true.” They instantly become the bad person, even if they are disputing something that’s, for example, racist.

I mean, I often wonder if teachers have to deal with kids screaming at them about how they are being negative and divisive for giving them a D on a test, because they are emulating how their parents react to the opportunity to learn something. COVID destroyed personal relationships, and not just through the loss of life. There are countless stories of marriages, family relationships, and friendships destroyed by people falling into anti-vaccine conspiracy and QAnon rabbit holes during the pandemic. Not hard to see AI videos doing the same.

I will add, the tech companies design algorithms to get you hooked on online videos. As mentioned in the podcast, you can go from watching kitty videos to watching bullshit nonsense about Democratic-run child trafficking rings. And the tech executives, frankly, don’t give a shit.

How we can manage clawing back our democracy in a nation full of people being blasted with fake information daily is something I often wonder. How we can function as human beings when we don’t know what is real and what isn’t is something I also wonder. This, by the way, is why even mundane fake videos of, say, a prey and a predator animal playing together are dangerous.

It’s a brave new world, so to speak. One that I worry a lot about.

The last word goes to The Buggles.