![\"Sumaiya](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/480.png\")
<\/p>\nWhat\u2019s fact, what\u2019s fiction? Will we know?<\/p>\n
Sumaiya Motara <\/p>\n
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Freelance journalist based in Preston, where she works in broadcasting and local democracy reporting<\/p>\n
An older family member recently showed me a video on Facebook. I pressed play and saw Donald Trump accusing India of violating the ceasefire agreement with Pakistan. If it weren\u2019t so out of character, I would have been fooled too. After cross-referencing the video with news sources, it became clear to me that Trump had been a victim of AI false imaging. I explained this but my family member refused to believe me, insisting that it was real because it looked real. If I hadn\u2019t been there to dissuade them, they would have forwarded it to 30 people.<\/p>\n
On another occasion, a video surfaced on my TikTok homepage. It showed male migrants climbing off a boat, vlogging their arrival in the UK. \u201cThis dangerous journey, we survived it,\u201d says one. \u201cNow to the five-star Marriott hotel.\u201d This video racked up almost 380,000 views in one month. The 22 videos posted from 9 to 13 June on this account, named migrantvlog, showed these men thanking Labour for \u201cfree\u201d buffets, feeling \u201cblessed\u201d after being given \u00a32,000 e-bikes for Deliveroo deliveries and burning the union flag.<\/p>\n
Even if a man\u2019s arm didn\u2019t disappear midway through a video or a plate vanish into thin air, I could tell the content was AI-generated because of the blurred background and strange, simulation-like characters. But could the thousands of other people watching? Unfortunately, it seemed not many of them could. Racist and anti-immigration posts dominated the comment section.<\/p>\n
I worry about this blurring of fact and fiction, and I see this unchecked capability of AI as incredibly dangerous. The Online Safety Act<\/a> focuses on state-sponsored disinformation. But what happens when ordinary people spread videos like wildfire, believing them to be true? Last summer\u2019s riots were fuelled by inflammatory AI visuals, with only sources such as Full Fact<\/a> working to cut through the noise. I fear for less media-literate people who succumb to AI-generated falsehoods, and the heat this adds to the pan.<\/p>\n AI can help tell great stories \u2013 but who controls the narrative?\u00a0<\/p>\n Rukanah Mogra<\/p>\n Leicester-based journalist working in sports media and digital communications with Harborough Town FC<\/p>\n The first time I dared use AI in my work, it was to help with a match report. I was on a tight deadline, tired, and my opening paragraph wasn\u2019t working. I fed some notes into an AI tool, and surprisingly it suggested a headline and intro that actually clicked. It saved me time and got me unstuck \u2013 a relief when the clock was ticking.<\/p>\n But AI isn\u2019t a magic wand. It can clean up clunky sentences and help cut down wordiness but it can\u2019t chase sources, capture atmosphere or know when a story needs to shift direction. Those instinctive calls are still up to me.<\/p>\n What\u2019s made AI especially useful is that it feels like a judgment-free editor. As a young freelance journalist, I don\u2019t always have access to regular editorial support. Sharing an early draft with a real-life editor can feel exposing, especially when you\u2019re still finding your voice. But ChatGPT doesn\u2019t judge. It lets me experiment, refine awkward phrasing and build confidence before I hit send.<\/p>\n That said, I\u2019m cautious. In journalism it\u2019s easy to lean on tools that promise speed. But if AI starts shaping how stories are told \u2013 or worse, which stories are told \u2013 we risk losing the creativity, challenge and friction that make reporting meaningful. For now AI is an assistant. But it\u2019s still up to us to set the direction.<\/p>\n Author\u2019s note: I wrote the initial draft for the above piece myself, drawing on real experiences and my personal views. Then I used ChatGPT to help tighten the flow, suggest clearer phrasing and polish the style. I prompted the AI with requests such as: \u201cRewrite this in a natural, eloquent Guardian-style voice.\u201d While AI gave me useful suggestions and saved time, the core ideas, voice and structure remain mine.<\/p>\n Does our environment pay the price of AI?<\/p>\n Frances Briggs<\/p>\n Manchester-based science website editor<\/p>\n AI is powerful. It\u2019s an impressive technological advancement and I\u2019d be burying my head in the sand if I believed otherwise. But I\u2019m worried. I\u2019m worried my job won\u2019t exist in five years and I\u2019m worried about its environmental impact.\u00a0<\/p>\n Attempting to understand the actual impact of AI is difficult; the key players are keeping their statistics close to their chests.\u00a0What I can see is that things are pretty bad. A\u00a0recent research<\/a>\u00a0paper has spat out some ugly numbers. (It joins\u00a0other papers<\/a>\u00a0that reveal a similar story.) The team considered just one case study<\/a>: OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT-4o model. Its annual energy consumption is about the same as that of 35,000 residential households. That\u2019s approximately 450,000 KWh-1. Or 325 universities. Or 50 US inpatient hospitals.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s not all. There\u2019s also the cooling of these supercomputer\u2019s super-processors. Social media is swarming with terrifying numbers about the data-processing centres that power AI, and they\u2019re not far off. It takes approximately 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools<\/a> of water to cool ChatGPT-4o\u2019s processing units, according to the latest estimates.<\/p>\n AI agents such as the free products Perplexity or Claude don\u2019t actually seem to be consuming that much electricity. At most, the\u00a0total global energy<\/a>\u00a0consumed yearly by AI is still less than 1%. But at the same time, data-processing centres\u00a0in Ireland<\/a>\u00a0consumed 22% of the total electricity used by the whole country last year, more than urban housing. For context, there are\u00a080 data-processing centres<\/a> in Ireland. At present, there are more than 6,000<\/a> data-processing centres in the US alone. With the almost exponential uptake in AI since 2018, these numbers are likely to be completely different within a year.\u00a0<\/p>\n In spite of all these scary statistics, I have to hope that things are not as worrying as they seem. Researchers are already working to meet demands as they explore more effective, economic processing units using nanoscale materials and more. And when you compare the first language-learning models from seven years ago to those created today, they have iterated well beyond their previous inefficiencies. Energy-hungry processing centres will get less greedy \u2013 experts are just trying to figure out how.\u00a0<\/p>\n If AI is the matchmaker, will I know who I\u2019m dating?\u00a0<\/p>\n Saranka Maheswaran<\/p>\n London-based student who pursues journalism alongside her studies<\/p>\n \u201cYou need to get out there, meet lots of people, and date, date, date!\u201d is the cliche I hear most often when speaking to people about being in my 20s. After a few questionable dates and lots of juicy gossip sessions with friends, a new fear emerged. What if they\u2019re using AI to message me?<\/p>\n Overly formal responses, or conversation starters that sounded just a bit too perfect, were what first made me question messages I\u2019d received. I am not completely against AI, and don\u2019t think opposing it entirely is going to stop its development. But I do fear for our ability to make genuine connections with people.<\/p>\n Pre-existing insecurities about how you speak, write or present yourself make a generation with AI to hand an easy prey. It may begin with a simple prompt, asking ChatGPT to make a message sound more friendly, but it can also grow into a menacing relationship in which you become reliant on the technology and lose confidence in your own voice. The 2025 iteration of the annual Match.com<\/a> Singles in America study, produced in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, found that one in four singles in the US have used AI in dating.<\/p>\n Perhaps I am over cynical. But to those who are not so sure of how their personalities are coming across when dating or how they may be perceived in a message, they should have faith that if it is meant to be it will be \u2013 and if AI has a little too much say in how you communicate, you may just lose yourself.<\/p>\n I can see humans and AI learning\u00a0together<\/p>\n Iman Khan<\/p>\n Final-year student at the University of Cambridge, specialising in social anthropology<\/p>\n The advancement of AI in education has made me question the idea of any claimed impartiality or neutrality of knowledge. The age of AI brings with it the need to scrutinise any information that comes our way.<\/p>\n This is truer than ever in our universities, where teaching and learning are increasingly assisted by AI. We cannot now isolate AI from education, but we must be ready to scrutinise the mechanisms and narratives that underpin the technology itself and shape its use.<\/p>\n One of my first encounters with AI in education was a request to ChatGPT to suggest reading resources for my course. I had assumed that the tool would play the role of an advanced search engine. But I quickly saw how ChatGPT\u2019s tendency to hallucinate \u2013 to present false or misleading information as fact<\/a> \u2013 makes it both a producer and disseminator of information, true or false.<\/p>\n I originally saw this as only a small barrier to the great possibilities of AI, not least because I knew it would improve over time. However, it has also become increasingly clear to me that ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI chatbots contribute to the spread of false information.<\/p>\n AI has rendered the relationship between humans and technology precarious. There is research to be done on the potential implications of AI for all the social sciences. We need to investigate how it is integrated into how we learn and how we live. I\u2019d like to be involved in researching how we adapt to AI\u2019s role as not only a tool but as an active and contributing participant in society.\u00a0<\/p>\n London-based graduate specialising in architecture<\/p>\n In my first\u00a0years at university, we were discouraged from utilising AI for our architecture essays and models, only using it to proofread our work. However, in my final year, it was introduced a lot more into our process for rendering and enhancing design work.<\/p>\n![\"Rukanah](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1755331567_266_480.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Frances](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1755331567_746_480.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Saranka](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1755331567_214_480.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Iman](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1755331568_642_480.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Nimrah](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1755331568_702_480.png\")
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