The biggest question surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) is whether its constant development will be a net positive or negative as the years pass. While AI has potential for good, the potential cons might overpower the pros.
Numerous tools that rely on AI have changed our world for the better. “[AI] can help people with disabilities… [with tools] like text to speech, or you can…communicate with someone that you don’t even speak the same language as, which is awesome,” says Sebaastian Dieve (‘26). AI has shown that it has the potential to greatly improve people’s lives, or at the very least make them way more convenient.
Unfortunately, AI has the potential to harm lives as well.
Image generating software has been growing at an exponential rate this decade, giving people the ability to make an image that people couldn’t take themselves. The biggest implementation of image generation seems to be people using it to create art, which has been a very controversial use case for it ever since it became popular, as people find the art to be inauthentic and insulting to actual artists.
All of this came to a head with the release on September 30, 2025 of Sora 2. Open AI’s new app which was created for the purpose of creating hyperrealistic deepfake videos using prompts that the user feeds to it. With this new update now enhancing the realism of the videos, Sora 2 immediately blew up, garnering over one million downloads in less than five days, with people mainly using it for the purpose of making people watch and laugh at the videos. You can make a cat play the flute or political enemies kiss.
Admittedly, the videos that Sora 2 can produce are pretty funny, and the ability to create any video is nice, as AI gets more advanced, it may become near impossible to identify what is and isn’t artificial. “It’s a…huge output of misinformation as well,” says Dieve. “People’s ability to create these hyper realistic videos of stuff that…never actually happened is kind of an issue,”
Deepfake videos also have the potential to do legitimate harm to people’s careers. “I think as AI progresses [and] gets more realistic looking, [it] could be used for legal [things], like making up [evidence] in court cases… [which can] ruin people’s reputation,” says Beau Tennyson (‘26).
As of now, though, the videos that Sora 2 can create are pretty obvious to spot as AI due to the watermark and aspects that don’t seem humanistic at all, such as disfigured body parts or animals doing things that should not be feasibly possible. However, these videos will become more and more realistic as time passes.
Another fear that people have when it comes to artificial intelligence is the prospect of losing their jobs due to AI. “Jobs in…computer science and Online Marketing and Economics… are [probably] going to be taken over by… AI [just] doing calculations all the time and predicting growth,” says Daniel Fettig (‘26), “I definitely think it’s going to take a lot of virtual jobs that require a lot of people.”
The one possible silver lining is that there are some jobs that AI will be near unable to replicate, like physical labor or healthcare professionals. “[Jobs] like healthcare professionals…you kind of need [that] empathy and… compassion to be able to actually do that,” says Dieve. “You don’t actually get that…genuine reaction or…feedback from AI.”
People’s fears about artificial intelligence are not overblown or dramatic. Someone being framed in a video that isn’t even real, or another person losing their job because AI can simply do something better is a prospect that nobody wants to think about, let alone see it to become a reality. Unfortunately, AI only seems to be getting better due to all the funding it’s been receiving. The only thing we can do is wait and see what happens.
