Weekly Journal: Iran-Israel War Sparks Wave of AI-generated Deepfakes
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. Learn about how AI-generated misinformation has flooded the internet since the start of the war between Israel and Iran.
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 134 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge. New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
- Ryan
🌐 Digital Assets Market Update
To me, the Metaverse is the convergence of physical & virtual lives. As we work, play and socialise in virtual worlds, we need virtual currencies & assets. These have now reached mainstream finance as a defined asset class:
🔥🗺️Heat map shows the 7 day change in price (red down, green up) and block size is market cap.
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is an insight into the underlying psychological forces that drives the market’s volatility. Sentiment reveals itself across various channels—from social media activity to Google search trends—and when analysed alongside market data, these signals provide meaningful insight into the prevailing investment climate. The Fear & Greed Index aggregates these inputs, assigning weighted value to each, and distils them into a single, unified score.
🗞️ Metaverse news from this week:
Robots are replacing humans jobs faster than everyone's realizing.
There’s fast-growing market, and concern, around physical AI. Robots doing real-world tasks like warehouse sorting, cleaning, or even electrical work. Companies are quietly rolling them out to replace human labor in ways that feel subtle but permanent. And while AI in screens gets all the hype, it’s the stuff with legs and arms that might change work the fastest. Here are 8 examples of real-world examples where it's already happening (click through to instagram)
Iran-Israel conflict sparks wave of AI-generated videos
AI-generated misinformation has flooded the internet since the start of the war between Israel and Iran. DW's fact-checking team has taken a closer look at a few examples in the video below.
We know that AI-generate content will populate much of the metaverse experiences, and we need to develop trustworthy ways to verify content. There is some experimentation using cryptographic signatures for this but its still early days.
👓 Read of the Week: CBC’s “The metaverse as we knew it failed, but it’s being resurrected for new worlds”
Published June 27, 2025 | CNBC
The consumer hype may have fizzled, but the metaverse is far from dead - it's just evolving. In 2025, the real momentum is happening behind closed enterprise doors, where immersive virtual environments are tackling high-stakes challenges from public safety to surgical precision.
Key takeaways from the article:
🌀 From Hype to Utility: No longer chasing a “digital twin” of our real world, today’s metaverse thrives when solving specific problems: scenario planning, skills training, legal simulations, and safety testing. It’s not about escapism — it’s about optimisation.
🏥 Enterprise-Driven Rebirth: From Osso VR’s surgical training tools (3x improvement vs. standard techniques) to ACSILabs’ courtroom simulations, the metaverse is becoming an indispensable layer of enterprise tech stacks. In one case, immersive training simulated three years’ worth of field experience in just 18 hours.
✈️ Engineering & Digital Twins: Aerospace firms are leveraging metaverse simulations to test jet engines in extreme scenarios — like lightning storms at 80,000 feet — without ever leaving the lab.
🔒 Risks & Realities: With great immersion comes great responsibility. Experts warn of:
Privacy concerns around biometric and performance data
Liability risks if training simulations are flawed
Psychological effects of highly realistic environments
Regulatory gaps around AI and data protection in metaverse settings
🧠 It’s Still a Simulation: While metaverse training has proven effective, experts caution that real-world readiness still requires real-world practice. Simulations can’t fully replicate stress, nuance, or unpredictability.
🎥 Watch of the week: TedX - Education in the Metaverse: An Exploration of the Next Generation Learning
This talk by Jared Mosseri delved into why Artificial Intelligence and the Metaverse should be integrated into educational environments, where they can supplement traditional learning. “There’s an old proverb: “Tell me, and I forget. Teach me, and I remember. Involve me, and I learn,” Jared shared. “The Metaverse is all about involving the learner.”
AI Showcase🎨🤖🎵✍🏼: Marc Benioff’s Race to One Billion AI Agents
In the Metaverse, AI will be critical for creating intelligent virtual environments and avatars that can understand and respond to users with human-like cognition and natural interactions.
Emily Chang meets Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to discuss founding Salesforce, the rise of AI agents, and what it’s like to run a very memeable global tech company.
That’s all for this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from keynotes about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Public speaking is one of many services I offer.