Key Points and Summary – The rise of AI-generated video threatens to erase the line between fact and fantasy, potentially pushing the world into a “Hobbesian” state of permanent conflict.
-This technology will exacerbate conflict in three ways: it will sow universal mistrust, fueling racism and extremism; it will be used to demonize enemies with fake atrocity videos; and it will allow states to easily manufacture a casus belli, a false justification for war, echoing historical precedents like the Tonkin Gulf incident.
-With the concept of truth already under assault, this technology could make rational discourse impossible and vindicate George Orwell’s dystopian warnings.
How AI-Generated Videos Could Start the Next World War
The ability of Artificial Intelligence to generate lifelike videos will exacerbate conflicts and promote wars. AI may also have a variety of salutary consequences, but they may matter little in a Hobbesian world of permanent war.
AI videos will promote conflict in the following ways.
First, they will eradicate the line between facts and fantasy, thereby sowing uncertainty, mistrust, and suspicion between states, groups, and individuals.
Rational people concerned with their own safety, security, and well-being will, even if intrinsically inclined to do good, do well to assume the worst about others and to act accordingly.
Candidates for and occupants of political office will likely be both victims and perpetrators of such films. Will rational discourse be possible under such conditions? Will democracy? Won’t authoritarian rule by a Leviathan that defines facts and fantasy for everyone be attractive?
In particular, in the struggle of all against all, we are more likely to trust, however cautiously, those who think, act, and above all look and talk like us. Compromising videos of them may strike us as less plausible, precisely because they resemble us, than compromising videos of others, who do not.
Ethnocentrism, racism, and supremacism are likely to take off. As will religious and ideological fanaticism, which will offer some semblance of certainty in a profoundly uncertain world and encourage people, in Erich Fromm’s words, to escape from freedom.
Second, since we are likely to view “them” as more threatening, AI-generated videos can easily serve to enhance their demonization and to provide both evidence of and pretexts for preemptive defensive actions that only confirm their suspicions of us.
Back in 2014, after Russia seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine, Russian propagandists circulated a fake photograph of a 3-year old boy, supposedly crucified by Ukrainians. The photo went viral, seeming to justify Vladimir Putin’s claim that Kyiv was in the hands of Nazis.
Imagine how much more potent the image would have been if it were only one segment of a film supposedly depicting Ukrainian soldiers capturing, mistreating, and killing a child.
And why stop with a child? Why not generate videos supposedly showing groups of savage Slobbovians attacking and destroying multiple villages inhabited by peaceful Lobbovians? With time, some of the videos may be exposed as fakes, but they will have done their damage and, if continually supplemented with numerous similar such fakes, could produce and sustain hysterical demands for revenge.
Third, and worst of all, AI fake videos could provide states seeking to go to war with a convenient casus belli. Two Hollywood films—Canadian Bacon (1995) with John Candy and Alan Alda and Wag the Dog (1997) with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman—satirized American policymakers looking for ways to enhance their ratings by painting Canada as a threat to American security and by concocting an imaginary war with Albania. AI videos could serve the same purpose.
American policymakers are no strangers to manufactured crises intended to justify wars. “Remember the Maine”—a ship that sank in Havana harbor in 1898 either as a result of an external mine or an internal explosion—was the war cry that contributed to the Spanish-American War.
The Vietnam War was in no small measure justified by the Tonkin Gulf incident, in which North Vietnam supposedly attacked a US ship. In fact, the National Security Agency created the incident.
Back in 1939, Nazi Germany staged an attack by Germans dressed as Polish commandos on the radio station in the border city of Gleiwitz. Naturally, Hitler had no choice but to defend Germany by invading Poland. And, finally, there’s the notorious Ems telegram, fudged by Otto von Bismarck in 1870 to stoke a war between France and Prussia.
Fake AI films could do all this and more, at far lower cost and with far greater effect.
The upshot of these developments resembles the state of nature described by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes as a condition of permanent conflict in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Naturally, Hobbes’s state of nature won’t appear overnight. But the disappearance of facts and their replacement by fantasy will lead ineluctably thereto.
Can anything be done to forestall such a dreadful denouement? There might be a happy end if facts, and thus truth, even if only with a lower-case t, continue to survive. And if states, groups, and individuals promise to behave.
Unfortunately, postmodernism has corroded truth from the left, while the world’s burgeoning populist movements have corroded it from the right.
Meanwhile, it would be pollyannaish to believe that all relevant actors will behave. Some will, some won’t—and all will thereby be compelled to promote fantasy.
George Orwell will be vindicated.
About the Author: Dr. Alexander Motyl, Rutgers University
Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”
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