Deepfakes are blurring reality, and as UFO sightings surge, the rise of AI-generated content threatens to erode public trust before any truth can land.
Last year, when loud cries of “UFO!” were heard in New Jersey, left, right, and center, you could almost hear the echo back: “AI!”
Online paranoia intensifies whether you’re a yeasayer or a naysayer in subreddits, with tensions running as high as those usually reserved for politics.
Questions appear daily like, “Is it real?” or “Is it the military, or just AI viral bait?”
Discussions are healthy, but what happens when every UFO sighting risks being dismissed as just another deepfake?
According to Barna Donovan, a professor of communication and media culture at Saint Peter’s University in New Jersey, AI has already killed much of the curiosity about the topic.
“Knowing how easily fraudsters can create AI videos of virtually anything… the interest in trying to figure out the truth behind this phenomenon could fade,” Donovan told Cybernews.
However, Reddit communities often garner support for one another in some cases. Proclaimed first-time poster @JohnNormanRules gave an insightful post on the Reddit r/UFOs group:
“Has anyone else thought that maybe the whole ‘disclosure is coming soon’ narrative is just a con to eventually sell us an AI-generated video that is indistinguishable from reality?” inquired the poster.
Clearly, AI is raising the bar for belief and debunking unearthly myths even further.
Manufacturing mistrust
Just before Christmas last year, when TikTok user Joey Malinski uploaded a fake UFO video of a spaceship flying in the Maryland sky, the real-vs-fake discussion was rampant.
In fact, X posts, Reddit threads, and TikTok videos often feature these real-vs-plant discussions, with little regard for those who claim actual contact, let alone whistleblowers.
If enough people no longer trust anything around them, the will to take any kind of orchestrated action, to take part in the democratic system itself, could erode.
Donovan observed.
Even if UFO sightings are considered by the general public to be a less favorable discussion than politics, for example, AI blurs the lines even further between reality and fiction, the same way it can for politics across a whole populace.
“Very soon, thanks to AI, we might actually wind up in a world where people can’t be entirely sure if they believe that there is a war in Ukraine because we all know how convincing AI imagery can be.”
Clearly, AI doesn’t just cast doubt on UFOs; it destabilizes shared reality.
Warped reality was a thing even back in 1938, when a fictional radio show tricked the American public into believing that Martians were invading the US.
The main difference is that this timeless radio cast has been put in a time capsule as treasured art, whereas AI is often derided as a blight to authenticity.
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