We need a ‘Stop, Drop, and Roll’ PSA for the AI age

“We are cooked.”

That’s the sentence I see with every AI-generated Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube short made with Seedance 2.0. And yes, we are. The walls of reality have finally vanished, sucked in by a black hole of Nvidia chips. So I’m going to Nancy Reagan the hell out of everyone and demand a global public service announcement like that old “Just Say No” to drugs campaign, which was everywhere when I was growing up.

We need Mr. T back to make young and old fools listen up, because the companies printing money with their generative video tech are doing zilch to fix the planetary problem they have created.

The message? Everyone should stop believing everything that moves online. Or at least question it all with a critical mind. All the time.

It will be hard. Probably impossible. The instant satisfaction of buying into whatever candy social media throws at us, algorithmically tuned to support our preconceived ideas, is too much to resist. We want to believe because dopamine is so yummy. And the digital overlords of Silicon Valley and Beijing know it. That’s why they have officially trampled our already fragile grasp on the truth with the release of models capable of manufacturing clips that are indistinguishable from physical life.

AI models like ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 can wolf down up to a dozen reference files—images, audio tracks, and camera movement samples—to flawlessly synthesize an alternate reality with no uncanny valley. And it costs only pennies do so.

We have effectively handed the keys to the multiverse to any basement-dwelling sociopath with a Wi-Fi connection. Tal Hagin, an information warfare analyst, told Euronews exactly where we stand: “We are no longer at the stage where it’s six months away. We are already there: unable to identify what’s AI and what’s not.”

The same computer industry that has destroyed the space-time fabric has failed to deliver its Content Authenticity Initiative, which promised a way to certify and label truly real videos. Imagine that. So someone needs to educate people to doubt everything they see online.

If you think I’m exaggerating the immediate danger, just look at the circus of Nicolás Maduro’s capture by U.S. Special Forces in January. There was no Seedance 2.0 then (less than two months ago!), but social media was instantly paralyzed by a flood of highly realistic, completely believable AI-generated images of the ousted Venezuelan leader.

Across X, TikTok, and Instagram, synthetic media of Maduro in custody or crowds of Venezuelans celebrating racked up millions of views in mere hours. Millions of people—including the usual politicians and tech billionaires whose thumbs are perpetually superglued to the retweet button—swallowed the digital slop whole.

Hagin noted that the moment an information vacuum opened regarding Maduro’s capture, “individuals started uploading AI-generated images of Maduro in custody of the U.S. Special Forces in order to fill that gap.”

The most worrying stuff is not those big news moments, which will get fact-checked promptly. It’s the little things, the daily stuff that will have greater impact on our psyches. The local news, the scams, the bullying in school, the gossip about that neighbor everyone hates, the teacher, the office enemy, the ex-partner . . .

When reality breaks, replaced by a manufactured one, everyone will suffer. 

So I’m calling for the Mother of All PSAs right now. We cannot sit around waiting for the tech industry to self-regulate, because history proves its leaders possess the moral compass of a weather vane.

We need a massive, impossible-to-ignore, flashing-red-light educational campaign pounded into the retinas of every smartphone user on Earth. We need to grab the public by the lapels and shake them until they finally understand that their own eyes and ears are now compromised enemy combatants.

So let’s do that. Let’s not assume that people will eventually get it because millions of lives and minds are at stake. For the next year or so, let’s launch a worldwide education campaign where every commercial break, every YouTube pre-roll, and every TikTok swipe features a brutal, relentless reminder that objective reality is officially a relic of the past.

Everyone must build up and wear psychological armor like we are living in an MMORPG from hell. This needs to be the 21st-century equivalent of “Stop, Drop, and Roll,” except instead of being physically on fire, your perception of truth is being incinerated by a server farm in Guangdong. We have to normalize radical skepticism before it’s too late.

But since nobody is going to do that, just remember, kids: Don’t believe everything you see. Love your mama. And don’t do drugs. Or do drugs because reality is not real. Who the hell cares anymore?

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