For as long as we can remember, different generations have clashed over evolving values and the consumption of information that alters one’s lifestyle and outlook on life.
The reality is that the older generations grew up in an era where published or broadcast content was inherently vetted. Whether it was in newspapers or on TV, most of what was delivered was real; that trust between media outlets and their readership or audience was earned over decades.
They could never imagine a time when that ingrained trust could ever be exploited, and not that they are gullible to what they consume now, but rather victims of a system they were never taught to distrust.
This has, of course, led to our parents and grandparents contributing to a cycle of misinformation through the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook. It’s infuriating, yes.
But even the younger generations have once or twice been conned by AI-generated content, so much so that organisations are filing lawsuits left and right to protect their creative rights. It may be easier for us to decipher what is real and what is fabricated; the elders, unfortunately, couldn’t tell a lick of a difference.
Before you click forward or share on that news bite, or yell “FAKE NEWS” at your parents for doing so, here are some tips to help ease the confusion, and hopefully add a little digital discernment to your feed.
Just because you see a photo or coloured background post plastered with a large bold text headline, it doesn’t mean that bit of news is true. More often than not, these posts are clickbait, a term meaning attention-seeking headlines.
These posts are designed to attract views and online engagement, regardless of whether the text is true.
Solution: Instead of forwarding said post to your friends and family, head over to your search engine of choice and double-check if the news is, indeed, factually correct. You don’t want to be coined as that person spreading rumours or propaganda, especially when it comes to sensitive topics.
Don’t be that guy.
We are so used to seeing airbrushing in magazine editorials, advertisements, and even in the media we consume that it becomes easy to take it for granted. It almost feels natural to assume that this perfectly polished image is real.
Why wouldn’t it be? Large magazines like Vogue and even TIME admit to airbrushing their covers. It becomes a problem when airbrushing starts to look less like ‘clean up’ and more like ‘uncanny valley.’
Solution: If something looks a little too perfect, instead of taking it as it is, maybe take a closer look. If you squint, you’ll see missing details.
Maybe the bracelet is missing a link, or there are six fingers instead of five. Perhaps there is something slightly… off about the expression.
A certain light behind the eyes is simply not there. That’s because a machine cannot generate the genuine movement of human emotion. It’s not airbrushing; it’s AI.
In 2025, we experienced a surge of AI-generated videos online, usually in the form of Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok videos. These videos often featured hyper-animated characters, some more mundane than others, with wacky storylines that carry no depth, lack coherent storylines, and confuse young minds.
You may often see these videos in the form of ‘Italian Brain Rot’ characters, namely Tung Tung Tung Sahur, a baseball bat, and Ballerina Cappuccina, a female cappuccino dressed in a tutu. These characters, and a throng of others, were generated to capture children’s attention with their bright colours, absurdity, and excessive dopamine.
These ‘short and funny’ videos actually do more harm than good, leading to shorter attention spans, stimulation overload, and emotional desensitisation.
Solution: In today’s world, sometimes new isn’t always better. We were children once, too.
The programming content we grew up watching still holds true to this day. In fact, some research suggests that the low stimulation of cartoons like Tom & Jerry, Sesame Street, and 2D Disney movies is better for developing brains.
With the integration of AI into our search engines, it feels only natural to simply plug enquiries directly into a chatbot, cutting the middleman out altogether. After all, the chatbot will pull information from all across the web, won’t it?
It certainly makes life easier when you don’t have to scroll through pages of information dumping, or really even think about what is important information and what isn’t. Especially when the chatbot will do it for you, like an incredibly helpful butler. (The bot will even let you call him Jeeves.)
Solution: How much time are you really saving? If it takes you an hour to find the right answer, how can you be sure that a machine can do it in under five seconds?
AI chatbots like ChatGPT are known to hallucinate answers, as they prioritise speed over providing factual responses. This can pose a lot of time-consuming issues for you in the future, especially if the answers generated have led you down the wrong path.
If your question requires important insight, serious enough for you to have called up a professional pre-GPT, consult your local GP or lawyer. They’ll have the right answers. In fact, they spent years studying them.
For all of you Gen Z-ers and Alphas, who think you’re immune to falling victim as children of the internet, how long did you really spend on that paper you were ‘writing’? Maybe double-check whether that link Chat set you up with for your bibliography actually leads to what you’re writing about.
It’s a shame good old-fashioned plagiarism has left the chat.
Try it Yourself
Artificial intelligence or the human touch, can you spot the difference?