AI is advancing at a scarily fast rate. “Scarily,” not because we fear technological progress itself (although some might), but because we know that we may not be able to keep up. Because, alongside the fear of being rendered useless or losing our livelihoods, there is also the fear of losing a clear grasp of what is real and what is not.
Take the slew of AI videos that have been circulating on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms lately.
Unless you have been chronically online from a young age (Gen Z and Millennials), or have trained antennas for hoaxes and subtle giveaways of manipulated content, there is a high chance you wouldn’t second-guess a photo of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg having a candlelit dinner, or a Veo 3 clip of the U.S. president delivering a speech in perfect German and then walking away backwards.
Some of these deepfakes are so realistic that, unless the prompt is deliberately made fantastical or absurd, they could easily fly under the radar. Trust in audiovisual truth is already thinning.
Misinformation (inaccurate information) and disinformation (outright lies) have been the Jessie and James of our world for years. But the advent of AI is making them nearly impossible to contain, to the point that even basic fact-checking has become a nuisance for most.
And what does that spell if not disaster? This erosion is exactly where propaganda campaigns thrive best.
The skillful use of communication to spread ideology and manipulate the populace toward a certain political goal has existed for thousands of years, from ancient empires minting coins with heroic portraits, Nazi and Soviet broadcasts during WWI and WWII, to the U.S. pushing the “weapons of mass destruction” narrative to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Collage by the author
What used to be a tool of the powerful to control the masses now has a special flavor. Propaganda is no longer top-down; it has become horizontal, decentralized, and personalized to the T.
Your neighbor can make it. Your parent can unknowingly share it. A bored teen on Reddit or a troll on 4chan can amplify it until it reframes the mood of an entire online community.
And because it’s suited up as polished video, fluent audio, or viral-worthy memes, you may not immediately question the source. But one thing you will surely do is react.
Modern propaganda overloads your already distracted and overwhelmed mind by delivering quick dopamine hits, feeding your logical side pseudo-evidence and fabricated statistics, and exhausting you with conflicting versions of reality. The result? A mind that either believes whatever the algorithm wants it to believe, or believes in nothing at all, and both become easier to:
- Sell to.
- Manipulate emotionally.
- Distract from real world issues.
- Herd in whatever direction mainstream media or powerful institutions want.
Because when you won’t bother to research, fact-check, or boldly follow a rabbit hole into what is real or fake, you hand over your mind, your choices, your spirit, and your children’s future to whoever is writing the next best prompt.
Truth may get buried, but it’s never truly dead when our minds are sober. So how can we protect our minds?
One obvious way to let your nervous system breathe and gain a fresh perspective is to take breaks from socials. To sit with yourself, and let your mind renew in silence.
Some of us have to be online every single day, soaking up every headline and clip, real or fake, because our work demands it. This constant exposure makes us more prone to mental burnout, hence complacency.
But we still have one tool that no AI can replicate. If something on your feed feels off, trust your human hunch.
Pause before you repost. Look for the source. Search for the same story on outlets with different opinions. If you come across content that makes you feel anger or fear, don’t numb it or run with it…listen to it and ask yourself first: who could be profiting from my reaction?
Teach your circle, your kids, parents, and friends, to sniff out deepfakes and manipulative shorts or edits. The strongest filter isn’t just your brain; it’s your whole circle refusing to swallow any manufactured pill.
Last but not least, let’s stay curious but not paranoid. Becoming blind to concrete evidence is just as destructive as trusting everything blindly.
