Opinion by j1 reporter Andrea Nyamedi

Imagine this scenario: you’re a person who loves cake. You adore frosting and fondant and all kinds of sugary sweet confections. So, you buy a bundt cake from Costco on sale for 50%. Lucky you! You take the dessert home, and just as you’re about to tear it up, your mom wakes up and snatches it up. “Cake isn’t edible,” she says, “because it has germs that cause arthritis and cancer.” And when you ask her where that information could’ve possibly come from, she answers, “Facebook.” She even shows you video proof of it happening in real time. Does that sound ridiculous? Because it definitely is. 

Even though that wasn’t a real story, there have been countless just like it. And oftentimes, when silly misinformation like this spreads, one thing stands at the scene of the crime: Generative AI. The artificial intelligence tool that generates more harm than good. We’ve all seen sloppy generated videos of celebrities dancing and animated fruit. Sometimes they’re funny, and sometimes they leave you wishing you never opened Instagram. But they’re tolerable, up until the point where their influence spreads to my family. 

My parents use social media like everyone else’s parents. They post their kids, scroll for an unreasonably long time, and receive ‘trustworthy news.’ I won’t criticize them for the latter; some things really do sound believable when you slap a news network title onto it. But the fault lies in the people who make AI videos to corroborate their fake news. It makes misinformation impossibly hard to discern from. Suddenly, iguanas falling from the sky in New York is real as long as video evidence comes with it. 

Some may argue that grown adults should be able to tell such fake news from real stories. But the scenarios I told have only been exaggerated. What if it’s a post about a school shooting or a new medical crisis? No matter how satirical the intention was, the creation of these kinds of videos has real consequences. Older generations shouldn’t have to ponder the authenticity of a social media post. Neither should said posts have imagery shocking enough to disrupt a parent’s life and beliefs.

 When something untrue is believed, it affects an entire family. Kids in my generation are the ones constantly living out the consequences of these stories, and they’re never as minor as cake being taken away.