The AI-generated scenes of Dubai (left) and Tel Aviv (right) are both completely fake.
american aircraft carrier Destroyed by Iranian missile. An American bomb destroyed a nuclear power plant. Burj Khalifa was engulfed in flames.
Nothing happened, but that didn’t stop people from spreading fake videos online.
In the days since President Trump’s weekend attack on Iran, an AI-generated video realistically depicting a completely fabricated event has been spreading like wildfire on X and other social media platforms.
For years, X (formerly Twitter) has been one of the most valuable tools for real-time information during breaking news events. But those days seem to be over. Since Elon Musk acquired the company, the platform’s usefulness as a reliable news source has steadily waned. Moderation was abolished, algorithms focused on engagement over accuracy, and resources were focused on Grok, a unique and problematic proprietary AI platform.
In a disturbing sign of how serious the problem is, Grok (X’s own AI tool) is misidentifying AI-generated content as real.
We’ve seen political AI content infiltrate the platform in the past, such as a hoaxed video depicting Jake Paul at a protest in Iran, but the recent strikes in Venezuela and now Iran have begun an onslaught of misleading AI video content.
The motivations behind the content vary. Some creators appear to be using AI videos to praise and celebrate President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s military actions. Others appear to be aimed at fabricating doubts about the war, undermining the confidence of the American public, and disrupting the information environment so much that no one knows what’s really going on.
And in a disturbing sign of how serious the problem is, Grok (X’s own built-in AI tool) is misidentifying AI-generated content as real. (A spokesperson for Company X did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but shared a link to a recent post by the company’s safety team.)
last month, mother jones” Ariana Coghill spoke to AI content expert Jeremy Carrasco about exactly this kind of scenario. Carrasco believes that fake content is a problem, but says the more serious harm is the impact this flood of AI content will have on our relationship with real video. When fake footage becomes convincing and common enough, people begin to question everything, including real footage of what actually happened. That’s the environment we’re operating in now.
It’s more important than ever to stay informed, but right now we need to be especially careful about what we accept as reality, even if we think we’re seeing it with our own eyes.
