Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
The use of artificial intelligence in modern wars is no longer an auxiliary tool for producing misleading content.
It has become a way of representing reality more dramatically and of quietly redefining how we are meant to see the conflict.
The goal is often a polished narrative of great victory, one in which a clear winner stands over a certain loser.
Researchers Mark Alfano and Mitchell Klintsevich have described a related phenomenon: content generated by artificial intelligence that does not always seek to deceive the viewer completely.
Instead, it floods the cognitive environment with noise and confusion, slowly draining our capacity to tell the real from the fake.
This echoes the ideas of hyper reality developed by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
In his reflections on technology and contemporary culture, he observed how boundaries between actual reality and its manufactured representations begin to blur.
Images, symbols, and media propaganda can become more influential and more present in the consciousness of ordinary people and decision-makers than material realities unfolding on the ground.
Baudrillard captured this starkly in his famous claim that “the Gulf War did not take place”.
For the global viewer, the war was not blood being shed or earth being torn apart. It was a stream of precision-guided bombs and carefully staged press conferences. The media image became the realistic alternative to the real war.
Yet, a deeper problem has emerged in our own time: what is sometimes called context collapse.
In moments of crisis, information-hungry audiences are pushed towards unreliable sources, including satirical clips, promotional material, or humorous videos that carry serious content without warning.
Confusion follows. Meaning is stripped from its original setting, and people find themselves, almost without noticing, caught in the trap of the shallow fake.
This is a quieter, more insidious weapon: facts mixed with falsehoods until the truth is forced into a permanent defensive posture, while the fabricated fragment slips easily into the mind of the recipient.
We see this clearly in the inflamed regional environment of the Middle East, whether in the war on Gaza or the Iranian-American-Israeli confrontation.
Artificial clips are often framed from ideal angles that show the precise moment of impact with a clarity and sequence real footage rarely achieves.
Genuine images are usually captured from a distance, by ordinary people sheltering or watching from relative safety.
To heighten drama and visual excitement, many of these generated scenes are set at night: the sky glowing with the colours of explosions, thick smoke rising against dark backgrounds.
The visual representation of destroyed sites does more than document a military strike. It becomes a form of visual and mental washing, an attempt to diminish prestige and violate the sense of sovereignty.
The role of the AI-generated visual environment does not stop at bombing and explosion. It reaches further, manufacturing associative emotion. It summons values of solidarity and bias by creating posts in which celebrities and influencers appear to join campaigns of political support for one side against another.
It produces video and audio of weeping or psychologically broken soldiers, visual signs of imbalance, and symbols of the opponent’s defeat.
When the psychological collapse of the other is presented as evidence that defeat was deserved, audiences are drawn into shaping not only their perception of the war, but their emotional response to it. It is no longer enough to show the event; the images begin to instruct people how they should feel and react.
Then comes the hybrid stage, one of the most effective forms of AI-enabled deception.
The generated material does not rely on pure fabrication. Instead, it confuses the real and the fake by amplifying genuine clips of fires, transplanting images from other contexts (floods presented as the aftermath of successive air attacks), or carefully blending in footage from flight-simulation games so that the raids appear more convincing.
The central danger lies here: the progressive collapse of the public’s ability to distinguish real from artificial.
Generative techniques allow events to be rearranged chronologically within the visual narrative, so that fabricated or altered scenes can be presented as if they occurred at a precise moment tied to a crisis. The sense of sequence itself is altered. Trends, emotions, and impressions of global public opinion can be quietly steered.
What makes narrative wars especially dangerous is that they know no truce. A field war may end with treaties and ceasefires. A narrative war does not.
In the midst of this digital conflict, the truth itself is steadily lost between fake clips and generated statements.
We have entered a post-military reality in which it matters less what actually happened than what people come to believe happened.
In that vacuum, darkness gains ground, human values grow thinner, and those who still try to understand the world around them find the ground shifting beneath their feet.
The demon of technology, namely artificial intelligence, begins to look like the real protagonist of this quiet human absurdity.
By Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Writer and an international relations scholar
