When AI commits suicide or kills us all!

There is a quiet but catastrophic crisis unfolding in the digital world - one not driven by rogue machines or science-fiction scenarios, but by something far more immediate: the collapse of trust. At the centre of it all is generative AI - tools that can produce startlingly realistic images, videos, voices and text. What started out as a novelty - a viral deepfake of a celebrity, a cloned voice prank, a synthetic political meme - has now begun to gnaw away at the very foundation of public life: our shared reality.

We are nearing a point where the boundary between the real and the artificial has all but disappeared. Videos of public figures making inflammatory statements, images of wars that never happened, synthetic voices delivering false confessions - none of this is theoretical. It is already here, and getting harder to detect. As AI-generated content becomes more convincing, the default human response will soon be suspicion, not trust. This creeping disillusionment is not just a cultural or ethical problem. It is essentially an existential problem for AI itself.

The power of AI - its promise in healthcare, education, journalism and governance - rests on a single, fragile foundation: the belief that what it produces can be trusted. But if AI becomes associated with deception and manipulation, if it becomes a synonym for disinformation, the public will reject it. This is not healthy skepticism. It's nihilism. It is the sense that "everything is fake, so nothing matters" - and it's particularly corrosive in democratic societies where shared facts are essential for informed debate and accountability. In that environment, trust becomes a casualty, and so does civil discourse.

If this trust collapses, AI would not be celebrated - it will be feared, regulated into a corner, or abandoned altogether in the public sphere. The companies building these tools may win short-term acclaim for technical brilliance, but they will lose the long game of social legitimacy. Ironically, this means that the greatest threat to AI is not political backlash or regulatory red tape. It is AI itself. That is why we must confront this issue head-on - with urgency and clarity.

First, AI-generated content must be clearly and indelibly marked. Whether it is a synthetic video, voice clip or image, it must carry a watermark - machine-detectable, permanent and tamper-proof. Not optional. Not buried in metadata. But embedded by design. This is technically possible but politicians, either unaware of the danger or reluctant to resist, hesitate to act.

Second, we need a global infrastructure for verification. Just as we have built institutions to monitor elections or nuclear material, we now need a robust, cross-border framework to authenticate digital content. Again, the tools exist. What is missing is political and industry will. Third, there must be real penalties for malicious deepfake deployment. Using AI to fabricate events, incite violence, discredit whistleblowers or manipulate elections must be treated as a serious criminal offence, not a clever use of technology.

Fourth, the public needs education in digital discernment. This is more than media literacy. It is reality literacy. People must be equipped to question what they see and hear - not to dismiss everything, but to navigate an information environment where deception can be indistinguishable from truth. And most importantly, AI companies must rethink their own trajectory. There is a false belief - especially in the tech world - that perfect realism is the ultimate goal. But if that realism leads to social collapse, if it destroys the possibility of verification, it is not innovation, it is self-sabotage.

AI does not have to be this way. We can still have synthetic content with ethical guardrails, intelligent systems that are powerful but accountable. But only if we act now, before cynicism becomes irreversible. Because the path we are on leads to a bleak paradox: the smarter AI becomes, the more damage it will do to the very conditions that make intelligence - human or artificial - worth having: trust, truth, and the capacity to engage with each other meaningfully. AI would not be destroyed by critics or regulation but by itself unless we stop it do so!