This week Google quietly announced that its Vids app now lets users direct AI avatars through text prompts, turning anyone into a video producer without a camera, a face, or an opinion. The same week, The New Yorker traced the team behind Explosive News, a Lego-themed AI video operation sharing pro-Iran content that got picked up by both Iranian government accounts and No Kings protesters. The content was being co-opted by ideologically opposed audiences simultaneously. That is not a bug. That is the feature of synthetic media: it is designed to feel like sincerity without containing any.

Google Vids, Propaganda, and the Sincerity Market

The Explosive News story is striking because the videos looked absurd, cheap Lego animations narrating geopolitical events, yet they spread. The aesthetic dissonance was part of the appeal. Compare that to Google Vids, which is pitching polished, professional-seeming avatars that a small business owner can deploy to explain their product roadmap. One is propaganda. One is enterprise software. Both are in the business of manufacturing presence without a person. Fast Company's International Fact-Checking Day piece offers five tips for spotting AI content, but those tips assume the viewer is trying to spot it. The Explosive News audience was not. The Google Vids customer is not asking employees to spot their avatar as fake. The detection frame misses the point entirely.

What Emotion Does to a Language Model

A 2026 paper in arXiv CS.AI by Sun et al. offers a mechanistic study of how emotion shapes LLM behavior, finding that emotional framing meaningfully changes model outputs. This is the technical substrate under both the Vids product and the Lego propaganda: a system that performs emotional register on demand. The avatar looks engaged. The Lego narrator sounds outraged. Neither is. The question is not whether AI can simulate sincerity. It clearly can. The question is who is capitalizing on the gap between simulation and the real thing. Right now, it is Google, it is state-adjacent propaganda operations, and it is anyone with a prompt. .