DAVID COOK / ASST. NEWS EDITOR

It started with videos of animals on trampolines. Over the past two weeks, my reels have been filled with AI-generated clips of animals like elephants, gorillas or kangaroos bouncing on trampolines. Many of these videos are essentially indistinguishable from reality. 

Not two weeks later, AI went from cute and impractical to something significantly larger: full, realistic videos. With OpenAI’s new Sora model, you can type a sentence and receive a movie-quality clip that appears to have been shot on a professional set: no camera, no actors, no humans ­— just code.

Sora also released its model to the public in an app that has an interface nearly identical to that of TikTok, where users can scroll endlessly through videos, all created by AI. That’s how fast things are moving. AI isn’t growing steadily; it’s exploding.

Each model builds upon the one before it, learning faster, producing more and getting freakishly good at mimicking reality. What took decades for film and animation to achieve, has been done by AI in a span of just months.

A lot of people see this rapid growth as a good thing. Sure, AI has its perks, making creativity more accessible. Now, you don’t need fancy equipment or big budgets to make content anymore. In this aspect, a benefit to AI is that it can help small creators, speed up editing and even push innovation in medicine, science and education. These possibilities are real and  endless.

The same technology  that   can  generate   art,  can   also    create exploitation. Tools like Sora  can  make  videos so realistic that distinguishing  the truth  from fiction  becomes nearly impossible. 

On top of that, Sora has  a verification option, where anyone — celebrities or civilians — can not only create AI generated content of themselves, but also make content of other verified creators. This has created a trend of viral AI-generated videos of verified creators like Mark Cuban, Jake Paul and Sam Altman. 

Sora also has content policy guidelines  that ban   inappropriate videos from being produced. However,  many    people  have access to this technology independently, so  that they do not have to follow Sora’s content policies. This creates scary possibilities like political propaganda and pornography. 

The possibilities are literally endless, and that brings me — like many others — a sense of uneasiness for what could come next.

Then, there’s also the rise of the AI  actors,  which is  potentially  a clearer sign of  where this is all headed. One of these examples is the fully digitized and developed actress: Tilly Norwood is a completely digital actress with her own agent, along with interviews and brand deals. 

She doesn’t actually exist, but she’s  taking  up  space  and  taking roles like she does. For studios, that’s the dream:  no  salaries,  no unions, no personal boundaries. For real actors, it’s a nightmare.

It’s absurd how easily “innovation” turns into replacement. AI isn’t just automating    jobs — it’s  automating people. Writers, editors, artists and now performers are being phased out by systems trained on their own work.

Meanwhile the laws aren’t exactly catching  up. Governments are still arguing over data privacy while deepfakes, fake voices and synthetic bodies are  being  used  to take real jobs and ruin real lives. 

In May, the Trump administration’s Big Beautiful Bill,  initially  proposed  leaving   AI laws up to the state’s  discretion, but that was quickly removed after bipartisan disapproval. 

Just before the removal of this clause, President Trump signed the “TAKE IT DOWN Act” into law, criminalizing non-consensual deepfake videos, but falls short in some ways. The law only prohibits sexually explicit images, leaving out important topics like political deepfakes or fake interviews, AI-generated audio recordings, among other things. 

The scope  of the bill is very narrow, so we will undoubtedly see future bills regulating soon.

At some point, we have to ask whether this technological progress really is progress or  not when it is erasing the people who made it possible. The same tools that let anyone create also lets anyone distort, inviting a world where everything always has a possibility of being AI-generated.

This is the paradox of our current world — we’re building technology that imitates humanity better than humanity can regulate it. If AI keeps growing at this exponential rate, and still remains unchecked, then the line between real life and an AI generated video will blur. What I fear is when the line becomes so blurry that it will vanish entirely. When that happens, the question won’t be what can AI do next, but what is left for us to do at all.

One of the AI -generated viral videos of an elephant jumping on a trampoline went viral on TikTok, tricking many viewers. Photo courtesy of  @Cartoon 4D/TikTok