One day while I was home on winter break this year, my mom broke our silent phone time and asked me to look at a video (on Facebook, of course), but this wasn’t the typical sped up clip of a middle-age white lady combining odd ingredients in a crock pot — although the video she did show me spawned similar feelings of unsettling concern.
The video showed a compilation of animals being saved by firefighters in Los Angeles amidst the devastating L.A. wildfires. One firefighter, standing heroically in front of a blazing forest, picked up a small brown bear and carried him away from the flames. In another clip, a firefighter stood amongst the fire while cradling a family of porcupines in a blanket.
The glossy visuals and strange movements immediately told me the video was AI generated — it evidently was not real, L.A. doesn’t even have brown bears for starters.
But my mom, love her, was teary-eyed over the brave firefighters before I had to explain to her that it was totally fake.
While I got a good laugh out of my mom being fooled, I also felt an extreme discomfort thinking about the implications of AI-generated content taking over social media.
That feeling has only gotten worse.
At the beginning of 2025, Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times that they had plans to create more AI characters – which are artificial profiles powered by AI, each with their distinct personalities – and that Meta expects the AIs to “exist on [Meta’s] platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.”
Near the end of January, Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would spend over 60 billion dollars on AI infrastructure, including building a data centre that would cover a large area of Manhattan.
Not only has the AI generated slop – created to farm engagement and prey on the heartstrings of people, like my mom, that don’t know any better – taken over Facebook, now Meta itself wants to pump out AI characters in the hope of making Meta’s platforms, according to Hayes, “more entertaining and engaging.”
In an age where we have unlimited access to more forms of entertainment than someone 100 years ago could ever dream of, why do we need more entertainment and engagement?
Setting aside the concern of possible widespread disinformation and the harm AI causes to the environment, my aforementioned discomfort is caused by the inherent suspicion and distrust I now have of every photo and video that comes across my feed.
Since AI’s popularity blew up, my experience using the internet has drastically changed. On Facebook, the very few minutes I spend using it per day are now encompassed by anger, annoyance and skepticism. Every other post is an AI generated recipe or renovated houses, which has become a game to spot what’s wrong with the images when I come across them. Sometimes I get AI generated photos of elderly people crying while holding birthday cakes, because the caption explains they ‘baked it themselves’ and ‘nobody wished them a happy 110th birthday.’
While this seems silly, the uprise in AI generated posts has made me doubt the legitimacy of all images, unless it was taken by someone I know. I spend my time on social media zooming in on each photo if my gut tells me something is wrong with it.
Maybe it’s a good thing to be more skeptical. But the issue is I don’t want to be skeptical of posts about kitchen renovations and chocolate chip cookies, or guilt tripped by a 110-year-old AI person who is lonely on their birthday. I feel like I’m going crazy.
However, AI will only improve and the mistakes will be fewer and harder to spot. The serious implications of this extend beyond feeling annoyed when I open Facebook — AI generated photos devalue real images and their power.
In my digital photography class, we learned about documentary photographer Lewis Hine, who took over 5,000 photos of American child labourers and their working conditions in the early 1900s. He thought that if people could see the injustices with their own eyes, they would change perspectives on child labour. By 1920, child labour numbers were halved compared to 1910.
But with AI, seeing is no longer believing.
If we are constantly plagued with suspicion that what we are seeing is fabricated, real images could lose their power to make change. In a world where we consume hundreds of images and videos everyday, I feel an uncomfortable hopelessness knowing that a significant amount of what I see online is simply not real.
But while tech companies are putting billions of dollars into AI and fake accounts continue posting weird AI videos that exploit concern for wildfires, all I can do is go outside and touch some grass.
