Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Albania's new AI-generated minister Diella speaks during the parliamentary session for the voting of the new government of Albania, in Tirana on Sept. 18, 2025. Albania's new AI-generated minister Diella speaks during the parliamentary session for the voting of the new government of Albania, in Tirana on Sept. 18, 2025. Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. It's been three years since the launch of ChatGPT gave hundreds of millions of people access to a kind of digital genie in their pocket--and things have been getting stranger by the month. Besides billions of AI-generated emails and the technology's widespread disruption of education and cognitive work, in 2025, some people began to fall in love with their AIs.

While the complexity of 21st-century demands has promoted pedagogical approaches to foster complex competencies, a persistent gap remains between in-class learning activities and individualized learning or assessment practices. To address this, studies have explored the use of AI-generated characters in learning and assessment. One attempt is scenario-based assessment (SBA), a technique that not only measures but also fosters the development of competencies throughout the assessment process. SBA introduces simulated agents to provide an authentic social-interactional context, allowing for the assessment of competency-based constructs while mitigating the unpredictability of real-life interactions. Recent advancements in multimodal AI, such as text-to-video technology, allow these agents to be enhanced into AI-generated characters. This mixed-method study investigates how learners perceive AI characters taking the role of mentor and teammates in an SBA mirroring the context of a collaborative science investigation. Specifically, we examined the Likert scale responses of 56 high schoolers regarding trust, social presence, and effectiveness. We analyzed the relationships between these factors and their impact on the intention to adopt AI characters through PLS-SEM. Our findings indicated that learners' trust shaped their sense of social presence with the AI characters, enhancing perceived effectiveness. Qualitative analysis further highlighted factors that foster trust, such as material credibility and alignment with learning goals, as well as the pivotal role of social presence in creating a collaborative context. This paper was accepted as an full paper for AIED 2025.

From books and paintings to movies and musical theatre, artists have often drawn on the stories of the Bible for inspiration. Now, social media users are putting a distinctly modern twist on this trend by using AI to imagine biblical characters as influencers. In these videos, characters such as Adam and Eve, Samson, and David appear to'vlog' their way through the events of the Bible. In one viral video posted to X, a smiling Jesus declares from the cross: 'Yo fam, they don't know that G-O-D is about to BRB.' In another clip, an AI-generated character says: 'Your boy David here. About to yeet this little stone at Goliath and see what happens.' These short AI-generated clips have proven to be wildly popular online, with one TikTok account named theaibibleofficial racking up 26.7 million likes.

In the last few years, many strategies and tactics have been used to generate and spread online misinformation. But a recent approach that taps into the power of artificial intelligence to create photos with high accuracy of fictitious personas that purport to be journalists or field experts poses a serious and novel threat to our society. The AI-generated characters fall under a broad umbrella called synthetic media that relies on a technique called generative adversarial network (GAN), in which two networks compete to create photos that are cross-checked to determine whether they are realistic or not. Many websites and applications are now available to generate these photos without the need of any technical background, and they are incredibly convincing. In regard to disinformation campaigns, AI-generated characters have been utilized in three main ways.

One of the latest and much talked about tech advancements is creating hyper-realistic digital characters with the help of AI. However powerful, AI character generation has been mostly making the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Synthetic media, or deepfake, was recently used to manipulate personal data and feed it into facial recognition systems, leading the Chinese government to lose as much as $76 million. And this is just one example of the widespread use of deepfake technology for dangerous activities. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab, along with collaborators at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Osaka University, have collaborated to change that narrative.