A few weeks ago, a friend of mine showed a group of us an ad video for an educational program he’s setting up. Its details are not important here. But the clip, a few minutes long, was so perfectly done, using families in multiple home settings and cultures, that I doubted he could have afforded to make it, knowing his currently somewhat limited resources. Nothing else in the video prompted me to ask him if it had been made using AI: it was flawless, unlike anything I’ve yet seen from such a production process. Yes, he admitted, it was AI-made. But there was NO “uncanny valley” at all, nothing to give it away except a rough knowledge of my friend’s spending power.
Flashback to Jurassic Park, the first of those films. Watching its rain-soaked, lightning-lit T-Rex for the first time, I can’t even remember where but likely on the big screen in some cinema, I remember thinking to myself: This is the first demonstration I have ever seen of flawless CGI (computer-generated imagery). That was in 1993, so, quite a while ago. From that revelation to this, in 2026. Not Jurassic Park’s budget of millions upon millions of dollars. Just some guy putting together an ad a few minutes long using free AI and some prompts.
That was when I made the next realization: That I am becoming less and less willing to trust whatever I see on any screen (not live before my eyes), because it can be perfectly faked. Lights, costumes, faces, voices, setting, music, you name it. The whole slick package. Used to be I could employ my super-sense of skepticism and debunk anything on Facebook or whatever as false. No more, it seems. Now I’m a bit more scared, I admit. I’m sure that many of you, dear readers, are far ahead of me on the timing of such thoughts. But at least I got here eventually, right?
Next: Someone influential posts or re-tweets online something scary enough that enough powerful people believe it. A war, local or world-scale, breaks out. Because people didn’t bother checking, and ran with their feelings. (Who now is old enough to remember the general panic that a radio play of HG Well’s War of the Worlds produced in the USA? The year was 1938).
Then, even more recently, a close friend of mine whose parenting style I’ve expressed admiration for confided in me that his children, from grade two to teens, don’t take his authority at face value anymore. They always have an answer. “Why bother to get educated, when X politician in country Y isn’t? When you, Dad, with your two university degrees, are a peasant in a small village?” Now, he’s always been a bit of a pessimist, but this was a new low. They simply have so much less desire, and feel so much less motivation, to learn at all. Sad, because I know how smart and gifted they are. Me, at that age? You’d have needed a crowbar to pry the books away from my hands.
My friend next told me that he had just settled an hour-long argument with one of his kids by resorting, with the child’s agreement, to ChatGPT as arbiter. The program agreed with the Dad, and the matter was resolved: He didn’t like it, but at least he had been proven right. This time, I said. Have you not heard of this or that AI successfully recommending that a teenager commit suicide as the best way out?! And the child went through with the act. He was shocked; not that he had expected ChatGPT to suddenly resolve all his issues with his children, not at all, but at the thought that there could be such danger in it.
I don’t have answers, only more questions, and a sense of relief (to be perfectly honest) that I am not a parent of a child in today’s world. To all of you who are, I salute you, and pray for the wisdom and grace you need to navigate. I DO believe that God will have the final word, and all will be made right. But when, how, and after what, I don’t know.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
