TechScape: Could AI-generated content be dangerous for our health?

From hyperrealistic deepfakes to videos that not only hijack our attention but also our emotions, tech seems increasingly full of ‘cognitohazards’

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Let’s talk about sci-fi.

Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash is the book that launched a thousand startups. It was the first book to use the Hindu term avatar to describe a virtual representation of a person, it coined the term “metaverse”, and was one of Mark Zuckerberg’s pieces of required reading for new executives at Facebook a decade before he changed the focus of the entire company to attempt to build Stephenson’s fictional world in reality.

Seeing a watermark doesn’t necessarily have the effect one would want, says Henry Parker, head of government affairs at factchecking group Logically. The company uses both manual and automatic methods to vet content, Parker says, but labelling can only go so far. “If you tell somebody they’re looking at a deepfake before they even watch it, the social psychology of watching that video is so powerful that they will still reference it as if it was fact. So the only thing you can do is ask how can we reduce the amount of time this content is in circulation?”