Don't Trust the Computer: AI Media Generation And How it Can Destroy Us

By Beowulf Laughlin-Koch

“Make me an image of beautiful rolling sand dunes, with a rising sun in the background.”

“Make me an image of a politician announcing a policy change on a live broadcast.”

“Make me an image of a man confessing to a crime in a dim interrogation room.”

OpenAI has been one of the most prevalent names in recent history. From creating by far the most influential AI chatbot currently used (ChatGPT) to forging one of the first genuinely functional image generators (DALL-E), OpenAI has ruled the world of the internet for the last decade. And now they’ve laid claim to even more land.

On the day of September 30, 2025, OpenAI’s new product Sora 2 was released. Sora 2, along with its predecessor Sora, are text-to-video apps that allow users to type in a short prompt to generate images or videos. 

Sora began life with promise. The OpenAI developers working on the project described it as “teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real life interaction.” With the release of Sora 2, the system got more powerful - now able to create realistic motion and detailed audio in videos. In these early demos, the possibilities felt infinite: massive fantasy scenes, urban nighttimes, sprawling mountains, sunny sand dunes. That creative accessibility was Sora’s biggest promise.

Yet almost as soon as Sora 2 hit the market, the concerns flooded in. Artists, ethicists, and ordinary users quickly flocked to point out the many negatives of Sora. With the ability for users to create whatever they want comes the ability for users to misuse and abuse the software. 

Simple text-based generative AI like ChatGPT, Gemini and Poe were already controversial for trivializing so many tasks and taking away the human side of writing. Sora takes this to the next level. Sure, you could use Sora 2 to make harmless content, like artwork for a project or images for inspiration, but it can be used for the worse as well.

In recent times, AI has been used to create anything from harmful deepfakes of celebrities and normal citizens alike, to faking political moments and speeches. And now that Sora 2 has given everyone an easy way to create fake news and spread lies on the internet, most visual media will become impossible to trust incredibly soon. Already sites like YouTube and TikTok are facing epidemics of AI videos, these low-effort and fake clips plaguing the internet and ruining so many sources of entertainment people once used regularly. 

The issues with AI span far beyond entertainment. With photorealistic image and video generation, comes the ability to make anyone say anything without their consent or their involvement. Already, people have faked videos of celebrities and politicians alike to slander their reputation and push their own agenda. Whether it be a video of Taylor Swift saying something controversial, or a government official doing something that goes against their views, anyone with an internet connection and a bad agenda can easily destroy reputations.

See those images at the beginning of the article? Those are fake. Generated by Sora 2. Now imagine that level of quality, but in video form with working audio and a depiction of a real person instead of made up characters. Imagine being accused of a crime you never did, and having to watch yourself confess in video form when you never did. Imagine being a celebrity and being called out for saying something terrible that you never said. Imagine being a politician and having your entire point of view invalidated by a fake video of you disagreeing with yourself. Innocent people can have their lives ruined with a click of a button by some unjust individual. 

The looming threat of AI is not a new one. Ever since the internet was created, many have rallied against all things online and sworn off the world wide web. From theories that blew up into full groups like Y2K to online incidents that forever changed people’s view of the web, there’s never been a time where there was not a truckload of concerns involving the internet. AI has been one of those. Movies like Terminator, the Matrix, and I Robot, as well as books like Illuminae and other media have warned against AI from the beginning. They were right.

The creation of AI this powerful has been a long time coming. Now all we can do is deal with the consequences of our creations.

Work Cited

OpenAI. “Sora: Creating video from text.” OpenAI, 15 February 2025, https://openai.com/index/sora/?utm_source=chatgpt.com. Accessed 9 December 2025.