Two videos of a tiger have been doing the rounds this week.
Only one of them is real. That’s the one that should never have been shared.
Last Saturday, a 23-year-old man, who sadly had a history of mental illness, died at a Yorkshire Wildlife Park after climbing into the tiger enclosure. People filmed it. Police asked the public not to share the footage. His family begged people to stop.
On Tuesday, the President of the United States posted it on his Truth Social platform, with the caption ‘Don’t ever mess with nature!’
Then, shortly before midnight, he followed it up with an AI-generated video of himself squaring up to a tiger. He points at it, wrestles it to the ground and ends up hugging it, all to ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’.
A real death in the afternoon. A cheap and insensitive joke by midnight.
Is that where we are now? A young man in a mental health crisis dies, and it becomes a punchline?
Somewhere along the way, people’s moral compass has gone badly off course, and the Shredded Wheat-haired president is leading the way.
It’s something of a habit of his. Remember when he posted images of himself dressed as the Pope? Or the video of him in a fighter jet marked ‘King Trump’, dumping sludge on protesters? Each time the reaction is outrage, and each time the outrage is the point.
Attention is the currency. Crassness pays.
That’s the trouble. The technology isn’t the problem. The absence of any moral filter in the people using it is. Can people really be trusted with something this powerful? Obviously the president can’t.
There’s no pause to ask who might be watching. No thought for a family coming to terms with a terrible death, scrolling through their feed and finding a cartoon of a man cuddling the animal that killed him. Anything goes, posted at midnight, to millions.
Like many of us, I use AI. It has its benefits. But I believe every tool takes on the character of whoever picks it up. A camera can bear witness, or it can exploit.
Generative AI removes the friction that used to sit between a vulgar impulse and a finished piece of content. No crew, no budget, no colleague saying whether we should be doing this. A few prompts and a family’s worst day becomes a meme.
That friction had a name. It was called judgement.
Those of us who make things for a living carry some of the responsibility. Our value has always rested less on what we can make and more on what we choose not to. AI hasn’t changed that. If anything, it has made it the whole job.
AI models will keep getting better. Whether the people using them do is another matter.
