When Moses Becomes an Influencer: How AI Video Generation is Rewriting Reality
If Moses were an influencer, this is what his videos would look like.
That thought might sound absurd, but thanks to Google’s latest AI video generator, Veo 3, we’re witnessing biblical figures potentially going viral on social media. This lighthearted example showcases something profound: AI video generation has crossed a threshold that should make us all pause and ask, “Chat, is reality cooked?”
The Uncanny Valley Has Been Crossed
We’ve moved far beyond the jerky, obviously artificial videos that marked early AI generation attempts. Today’s AI video tools like Veo 3, OpenAI’s Sora, and others are producing content that’s increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality. The technology can now generate:
Photorealistic human faces and expressions
Natural movement and body language
Consistent lighting and shadows
Believable environments and backgrounds
Synchronized voices and visual elements
What makes this particularly striking is how quickly we’ve progressed. Just two years ago, AI-generated videos looked like fever dreams. Now, they’re approaching broadcast quality.
The Creative Renaissance
The positive potential of this technology is genuinely exciting. We’re witnessing a democratization of high-quality video production that could revolutionize multiple industries:
Education and Historical Visualization: Imagine history classes where students can witness accurate recreations of historical events, or science lessons that bring abstract concepts to life through impossible-to-film scenarios.
Entertainment and Storytelling: Independent creators can now produce Hollywood-level visual effects without Hollywood budgets. Stories that were previously impossible to tell due to cost constraints can now be brought to life.
Accessibility and Preservation: We can create visual content in languages and formats that serve underrepresented communities, or preserve cultural performances and traditions in ways never before possible.
Medical and Scientific Training: Complex procedures, dangerous scenarios, or microscopic processes can be visualized for training purposes without risk or expense.
The Dark Side of Digital Deception
However, the same technology that can bring Moses to YouTube also threatens the very foundation of shared truth. The negative implications are equally profound:
Deepfake Proliferation: As the technology becomes more accessible, creating convincing fake videos of real people becomes trivial. Political figures, celebrities, and ordinary citizens can all be digitally puppeteered without their consent.
Misinformation at Scale: Bad actors can now create “evidence” for false claims that appears completely authentic. Conspiracy theories can be supported with fabricated footage that looks indistinguishable from real news.
The End of Visual Evidence: In legal contexts, security footage, and journalism, we’ve long relied on “seeing is believing.” AI video generation fundamentally challenges this assumption.
Identity and Authenticity Crisis: When anyone can be made to appear to say or do anything, questions of authenticity become paramount. The psychological impact of living in a world where nothing can be trusted at face value is largely unexplored.
The Technical Arms Race
The response to these challenges has sparked a technological arms race. Detection tools are being developed alongside generation tools, creating a cat-and-mouse game between creators and validators. Blockchain-based content verification, cryptographic signatures, and AI detection algorithms are all being deployed, but they face the fundamental challenge that they’re always one step behind the generation technology.
Society at a Crossroads
We’re approaching what might be called the “post-truth visual era.” The implications extend far beyond technology into the realms of law, journalism, politics, and social interaction. How do we maintain trust in a world where seeing is no longer believing?
The answer likely lies not just in technology, but in media literacy, legal frameworks, and social norms. We need to prepare society for a world where:
Source verification becomes as important as the content itself
Digital provenance tracking becomes standard
Media literacy education, like what Finland has implemented, becomes as fundamental as traditional literacy
Legal systems adapt to handle synthetic evidence
The Moses Moment
The image of Moses as an influencer is a perfect metaphor for our current moment. We’re witnessing the creation of new tablets, not of stone, but of pixels and algorithms. These new commandments of digital reality will shape how we understand truth, identity, and authenticity in the coming decades.
The technology isn’t inherently good or evil; it’s a powerful tool that amplifies human creativity and human deception in equal measure. The question isn’t whether we can create convincing fake videos because we clearly can. The question is what we choose to do with that power.
As we stand at this crossroads, one thing is certain: reality as we’ve known it is indeed “cooked.” The question now is whether we’ll use this technology to cook up something beautiful or something that leaves us all with a bad taste in our mouths.
So, what do you think? Are you ready to smash that subscribe button on the future, or are you more inclined to hit the pause button on progress? The choice, for now at least, is still ours to make.
