The video that OpenAI released to unveil its new text-to-video tool, Sora, has to be seen to be believed. The demonstration reportedly prompted movie producer Tyler Perry to pause an 800m studio investment. Tools like Sora promise to translate a user's vision into realistic moving images with a simple text prompt, the logic goes, making studios obsolete. Others worry that artificial intelligence (AI) like this could be exploited by those with darker imaginations. Malicious actors could use these services to create highly realistic deepfakes, confusing or misleading voters during an election or simply causing chaos by seeding divisive rumours.

Perhaps Artificial Intelligence (AI) can come to our rescue. Yes, that's right, we might be able to harness the beneficial uses of AI to cope with our relentless tsunami of disinformation and misinformation. We might be wise to try doing so. Every avenue of potential solution would seem worthy of pursuit. There is no question that humans can readily leverage AI to generate disinformation and misinformation.

What are we going to do about the massive glut of disinformation and misinformation? It all is demonstrably getting worse and worse, with each passing day. Perhaps Artificial Intelligence (AI) can come to our rescue. Yes, that's right, we might be able to harness the beneficial uses of AI to cope with our relentless tsunami of disinformation and misinformation. We might be wise to try doing so. Every avenue of potential solution would seem worthy of pursuit. As an aside, I'd like to immediately acknowledge and note that AI is undoubtedly going to also be a part of the problem too. There is no question that humans can readily leverage AI to generate disinformation and misinformation. Furthermore, AI can insidiously be used to make disinformation and misinformation appear to be amazingly valid and fool humans into believing that the presented information is alluringly accurate and factual. A decidedly sad face side of what AI brings to the table. We will come back to this downside conundrum toward the end of this discussion. For now, let's put on our smiley faces and explore how AI is beneficial to bringing disinformation and misinformation to its mighty knees.

As Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie note in their recent book, "AI's [artificial intelligence's] new capabilities are both marvels and distractions." The marvel versus distraction dichotomy is an interesting one: due to the two possible natures of AI, the question of whether advances in AI will favor autocracies or democracies has come to the forefront of the tech and global power debate. On the one hand, AI has the potential to tackle some of the world's most challenging social problems, such as issues related to healthcare, the environment, and crisis response, leading some to believe that democracies will wield AI to create a future for human good. On the other hand, some fear AI-enabled surveillance, information campaigns, and cyber operations will empower existing tyrants and produce new ones, leading to a future where autocracies thrive and democracies struggle. By examining how advances in AI capabilities in the near future could benefit autocracies and democracies, as well as how these advances could benefit both, I believe that AI is likely to favor autocracies in the near term, but under one necessary condition: that democracies are negligent in their response to autocracies' destructive use of AI.

Communication is an essential pillar of society. Humanity's progression over the past millennium was largely driven by the development and evolution of communication as a tool for distributing siloed thoughts from one individual to others. Communication is naively defined as content and the mode of transmission -- symbols manifested as images, language transmitted through speech and writing, digital files sent through the internet. These are methods through which we communicate thoughts, ideas, facts, and opinions. New forms of communication emerge to expand the lexicon of thought and reduce the friction required to create and transmit content.