Week of Dec. 10, 2025

From the editor’s desk

There has always been confirmation bias. There has always been fake news. (An International Center for Journalists timeline dates it—actually, just the traceable examples of it—back to around 44 BC.) There have always been savvy manipulators of truth.

But as technology advances further, misinformation and manipulation are becoming yet easier to pull off. At this point, AI image manipulation technology is practically rolling out the red carpet to anyone looking to stoke our outrage and pit us against each other.

The New York Times reported on Monday: 

A video on TikTok in October appeared to show a woman being interviewed by a television reporter about food stamps.

The women weren’t real. The conversation never happened.

The video was generated by artificial intelligence.

​​And yet, people seemed to believe this was a real conversation about selling food stamps for cash, which would have been a crime.

In their comments, many reacted to the video as though it was real. Despite subtle red flags, hundreds vilified the woman as a criminal — some with explicit racism — while others attacked government assistance programs, just as a national debate was raging over President Trump’s planned cuts to the program.

The Times listed some of those red flags—an “AI” hashtag, a watermark and a label added by TikTok—and also noted how easy they are to miss.

The article continues:

Videos like the fake interview above, created with OpenAI’s new app, Sora, show how easily public perceptions can be manipulated by tools that can produce an alternate reality with a series of simple prompts.

The article is well worth a read. It gets into the details of how social-media platforms are considering moderating AI-generated videos—including their abilities to moderate and the financial incentive to not moderate. After all, the fake videos attract huge audiences, which are exactly what social-media platforms need to thrive.

Another piece of AI tech I keep thinking about lately is Apple’s cleanup tool. Have you seen this in action? It’s on iPhones starting with some of the 15 models, and it can remove a person or object from a photo easily, with just a quick swipe, like this: 

It has always been possible to doctor images, but now it no longer takes much skill to do it. (If you look closely, it’s not hard to spot some quirks in these quickly “cleaned up” images. In this instance, the older girl’s right arm is an obvious tell. But if you were scrolling quickly, it would be pretty easy to believe there really were two children on a porch, not three.)

We’re already pretty darn deep into a morass of misinformation and disinformation. With these advances in video and photo manipulation, we are about to get deeper.

The Times article ends with this quote from former U.S. State Department employee Darjan Vujica: “The barrier to use deepfakes as part of disinformation has collapsed, and once disinformation is spread, it’s hard to correct the record.”

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor