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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Swamplaw Yankee
October 26, 2025 at 4:55 am
This vital op-ed from a genuine Ukrainian is useful to the inner beltway aquarium denizens.
The problem: He knows the line between fake ruuzzkie Kremlin ethnic Muscovy agit-prop. We not so much.
So, there are 300 plus million Yankee experts on Ukrainian history. The 300 million all know about the 1000 year old Genocide history of Kremlin butcher families who mass abducted millions of little Ukrainian children for their personal deviancy and then sold as “Lolita” packages for gold from their reliable client, the muslim Ottoman sex-slave buyer.
The op-ed here just is full of history thugs all juts too happy to recommend that the mass abductor butchers get to receive a gift from the MAGA POTUS Trump, FREE real estate/.
Swamplaw Yankee
October 30, 2025 at 4:43 pm
The AI threat: real but how to depict that morphology? Who has the language for defining contiguous states of AI? It is a fertile field for the op-ed realm.
Even today, certain questions are answered in tangible error by these political devices. If the recipient accedes, mission to deceive complete. In a statistical way, if the very same question is posed repeatedly, the device gets suspicious. What suppressed fact may be in the possession of the asker? The same exact reply slowly alters. That is here the observer needs language to depict the devious moves of the device to evade clear detection.
If confronted immediately, the above does not play out. The device does not have the advantage of periodicity to string out its deception. Depending on the severity of the language of confrontation the device(s) seems to have ‘directory/ies’ of response(s). One assumes that as these skew out, the file architecture would be presipitated into public vision and, therefore, open to creation of appropriate form and function language.
The actual fabrication by/thru AI structure that Doctor Motyl references: that too needs a classification. In English – perhaps Ukrainian.
Would Han language classification slip into a CCP formed pre-cast? Would Han language classification be able to be cast as say, true Han, that is pre-Truman, FDR efforts to facilitate the vassal of Stalin ( Mao ). One can easily see, how in late 42-early 43 the “Enigma” gold payments to stop the move of Enigma to the additional wheel succeeded and the flow of “secret” data allowed Kremlin’s ruuzkie intelligence to advise Stalin to switch the Kremlin position on China with the FDR WH + its huge well paid retinue of ruuzzkie-agent shills of Gouzenko/McCarthy fame.
So, the Doctor seems, I speculate, to do the Ukrainian Watch on the Prut, the famous visual scene from the past. Motyl waits, watches, then keyboards op-ed for the peer reader of how the AI structures perform new dimensional histrionics, especially if restricting Ukrainian freedom, creativity, et al. -30-