New AI tools are already capable of generating highly convincing audio and video. Voices are being cloned with remarkable accuracy. Images are being fabricated that are almost indistinguishable from authentic photographs. And video technology has advanced to the point where a person can appear to say things that were never actually spoken.
Artificial intelligence promises extraordinary advances in science, medicine, and technology. But in the realm of public discourse, it may push misinformation into an entirely new phase. Until recently, most distortions have relied on editing real events — cutting clips, removing context, and rearranging fragments of genuine footage. AI makes something more radical possible: the creation of convincing events that never occurred at all.
Public debate once rested on the assumption that public speech would be presented honestly and interpreted in good faith. Increasingly however, as many have realized, this is no longer the case.
Over the past decade, the phrase “fake news” entered the political vocabulary to describe the manipulation of information in modern media. These distortions did not usually arise from elaborate fabrications, but from simple manipulations of context and presentation. They rarely involved completely invented stories. More often than not, they relied on the careful reshaping of reality: statements taken out of context, video clips selectively edited, narratives framed around fragments rather than the full record.
That process has become all too familiar. A short clip circulates online. A headline cements the accusation. Commentators repeat the interpretation until it becomes the dominant narrative. By the time the fuller context emerges, the story has already taken hold.
Several widely known episodes illustrate how this process works.
After the 2017 Charlottesville protests, a fragment of Donald Trump’s remarks — “very fine people on both sides,” referring solely to the Confederate statues debate — circulated widely as evidence that he had praised white supremacists. Yet in the same speech he explicitly stated that neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be “condemned totally.” That portion of the speech was conveniently excluded in the viral clip.