Fox News this week stoked public anxiety about artificial intelligence by combining apocalyptic probability claims with grotesque synthetic videos, intensifying a debate that researchers say already straddles science, ethics and politics. In a headline-heavy newsletter that linked to platform clips, the outlet wrote, “So there’s a 1 in 4 chance that artificial intelligence … will wipe us from the face of the earth,” and highlighted “seemingly realistic clips” it said were “made by OpenAI’s new video-maker Sora 2” showing a well-known civil rights activist in degrading scenarios.

The newsletter — which also carried the tagline “FOX NEWS AI NEWSLETTER: DEMS DEMAND ‘ROBOT TAX’” — repackaged two different anxieties: long-run existential risk posed by increasingly capable AI systems, and near-term social harms from hyper-realistic generative content. The juxtaposition matters because each set of concerns requires distinct technical and policy responses, experts say, yet the media framing risks collapsing them into a single moral panic.

Artificial intelligence researchers and ethicists offer a spectrum of views on the long-term question. Some prominent technologists have warned that sufficiently advanced autonomous systems could create novel systemic risks; at the same time, many practitioners emphasize that quantifying a specific probability of human extinction is speculative and methodologically fraught. Surveys of AI researchers show wide variance in such estimates, in part because the scenarios depend on cascading societal, economic and technical factors that are difficult to model.

The other, more tangible problem is already here: synthetic media. The clips circulated by Fox — attributed in the newsletter to OpenAI’s Sora 2 — illustrate how video generation tools can produce lifelike depictions of public figures, including deceased or historically significant leaders, doing or saying things they never did. That raises immediate legal and ethical questions about defamation, historical distortion, electoral manipulation and the weaponization of grief and memory. Platforms and AI developers have responded with watermarking, provenance standards and content policies, but enforcement lags behind generation capabilities.

The political fallout is emerging. Democrats have floated taxation and redistribution ideas tied to automation; the “robot tax” headline in Fox’s newsletter underscores how partisan frames can convert technical debates into economic culture wars. Regulators are already moving elsewhere: the European Union’s AI Act and a patchwork of domestic proposals seek to categorize and constrain high-risk systems, but colleagues on Capitol Hill disagree on scope and enforcement.

Journalists and policymakers face a dual responsibility: to avoid inflaming uncalibrated dread while not underplaying consequential harms. Sensational claims about extinction can skew public priorities away from governance measures that would reduce immediate harms — content provenance, disclosure requirements, and liability rules — even as long-range safety research and international coordination remain essential.

The surge in dramatic AI coverage is likely to accelerate policy responses and corporate commitments, but experts caution that durable solutions depend less on headlines than on sustained interdisciplinary work: rigorous risk assessment, transparent development practices, enforceable technical standards and a legal framework that preserves civic trust without stifling beneficial innovation.