To become an adult is to realize that now it is my turn to reach out a hand to someone helpless. Speech by Ola Myrovych at the Opening Ceremony of the LMF 2026
My social media feed stopped being mine a long time ago. Algorithms keep pushing me stories of people whose paths I have never crossed in life. Sometimes I think of this as one of the few ways left to step out of my bubble.
Just last weekend, my eye caught a selfie of a couple in casual shirts, posted in a Photoshop hobby group I had never seen before. "This is the only photo from our wedding day. Could you put me in a white dress with a veil, and my husband in a suit?"
Under the post I saw dozens of artificially generated versions of the couple in wedding clothes, kindly offered by strangers. Now, they will have memories of a day that never happened.
"Here is a photo of my paralyzed daughter. I would like to get a picture of her walking."
"My son was killed, and we have no photo together. Please merge our two portraits into one."
Sometimes reality becomes so unbearable that we have learned how to replace it. A few clicks of a mouse, a carefully written prompt for an AI agent – and a new reality is here. This reality needs no event. It needs no witnesses. A skilled user and a grateful audience are enough.
But what if all of this is not a compounded drug for one wounded heart – but a factory producing alternative reality on an industrial scale? Then authoritarian propaganda, bot farms, and synthetic videos become an invisible front line – one with real names of aggressors, real budgets, and real victims.
In this fight, the Russian network Pravda generates millions of artificial articles about Ukraine — not for readers, but to train AI on Russian narratives, so that the users later repeat them as own thoughts.
In Taiwan, hundreds of thousands of accounts turned out to be a Chinese bot farm, created to silence the voice of democracy. Sometimes there is no frontline on the ground, because it's a content moderator who decides where it runs.
In Ethiopia, a fake social media post cost a professor his life. His family asked the platform to take it down, but the platform refused. Of the ninety languages spoken in that country, the platform speaks only three.
Faced with an existential threat, the human brain offers a limited set of responses. What the body answers by instinct, the journalist and the intellectual must answer by choice — and this choice is never only personal, and never free.
Step by step, small compromises — each one innocent on its own, none connected to the next — build the reality no one wanted. Sixty years ago, Alfred Kahn called this "the tyranny of small decisions."
We can keep searching for balance, giving airtime both to the one who attacks and to the one who resists. We can stop writing about what is hard, because audiences are tired and, according to research, four out of ten people now avoid the news.
But can media still translate reality into the language in which the future speaks to us? For the sake of our tomorrow — where teachers can teach, historians can research, prosecutors can prosecute, writers can write, and filmmakers can make films, all of them standing on truth — we have to fight for that truth. The battle for truth is our decisive battle.
And we can only win it if we find the courage to look at a reality built by an algorithm and say: this story never happened. The happiness of a couple in love on their wedding day, like a mother's love for her son, is real. The photograph is not.
Think back to what frightened you most as a child. The darkness in your room? The monster under your bed? Or maybe the moment when an adult lets go of your hand in a busy market, and for one second you felt helpless and alone?
A child's fear has one mercy — it always ends. An adult comes in, turns on the light, holds us close, takes our hand, and walks us out. But what do we do now — when the threat is real, and there are no other grown-ups left?
To become an adult is to realize that now it is my turn to reach out a hand to someone helpless. That the monsters under the bed will not disappear until I open my eyes and dare to meet their gaze. That the darkness in the room will not end until I turn on the light myself.
In 1799, Francisco de Goya published a series of etchings called Los Caprichos. The forty-third in the series was meant to be called "The Universal Language". Instead, it came into the world under a different name: "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters."
The monsters do not come to a sleeping mind. The mind that is asleep creates them on its own.
The enemy of democracies is not only the names of dictators. The enemy is also indifferent citizens who have lost their moral compass — and the societies they form, the purest expression of political inertia. People who let their minds fall asleep — individually and collectively — to avoid the truth.
But ignorance has no excuse. It only creates the illusion of safety.
It lulls us to sleep. But do not let yourselves drift off. It is time to turn on the light