We're All Just Guessing Now

My daughter showed me a video last week of a dog supposedly playing fetch with a toddler in a backyard somewhere in America. Within about two seconds she said “that’s fake” and kept scrolling. I made her go back. I looked at it for a solid thirty seconds, squinting, trying to find the tell. The shadows were fine. The movement was fine. I genuinely could not tell you with confidence whether that dog existed.

That gap, between her two seconds and my thirty, is the thing I keep thinking about.

There’s a discussion going around on r/artificial at the moment about Gen Alpha kids and AI slop, specifically that they can spot the obviously fake stuff but increasingly can’t tell the difference between realistic AI video and the real thing. One commenter put it well: it’s like how an older relative can’t spot a photoshopped image but a teenager sees it instantly, except now the roles have flipped. We’re the ones squinting. They’re the ones who’ve grown up native to a feed where everything is suspect by default, and some of them have adapted to that faster than we have.

What got me was a reply further down pointing out the obvious trap in all this: being able to spot bad AI content doesn’t mean you can spot good AI content. I can reliably pick the six-fingered hands and the warped text on a shopfront sign. That skill is basically useless against the stuff that’s actually well made. It’s survivorship bias dressed up as media literacy. I notice the ones that get caught, and I assume that means I’d notice all of them.

I don’t know what the fix for this is, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells me they do. Watermarking schemes like C2PA sound sensible on paper, until you remember that the people making the convincing fakes have zero incentive to use them. Teaching kids to default to scepticism sounds sensible too, but there’s a cost to that as well. A kid who assumes everything might be fake doesn’t just lose trust in slop, they lose a bit of trust in everything, including the real footage of real things that actually happened. That’s not a small price. We spent the last decade worrying that the internet would make people believe things that weren’t true. The next decade might be people refusing to believe things that were.

I’ll admit a kind of weary contradiction here. I think the technology improving this fast is genuinely remarkable, and some of what I’ve seen generated this year would have sounded like science fiction when I started in IT. I also think handing a thirteen-year-old a feed full of synthetic video with no labelling, no friction, no adult in the room, is a bit like handing them a packet of durries and calling it a rite of passage. Both of those things are true at once and I’m not going to pretend one cancels the other out.

The same subreddit had another thread running yesterday about burnout from the pace of AI releases, people saying they’d stopped checking leaderboards, stopped treating every model drop as homework, and were happier for it. I felt that one too. There’s a version of this where you just opt out of the churn, bookmark it as someone else’s problem, and get on with your life. That works fine for picking a coding assistant. It doesn’t really work for raising a kid who’s going to spend her whole adult life inside a media environment where “is this real” is a live question every single day, not an occasional one.

I don’t have a tidy ending for this, which feels like the honest place to leave it. What I’ve started doing, in a small and probably insufficient way, is just narrating my own scepticism out loud when we’re watching something together. Not lecturing, just saying “I actually don’t know if that’s real” and letting her see an adult sit in that uncertainty instead of confidently calling it either way. She’s going to need the skill more than I ever did. The least I can do is admit I’m still learning it myself.