> people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up Regrettably this doesn't seem to be the case pre-AI - just look at

> people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up Regrettably this doesn't seem to be the case pre-AI - just look at the scare stories about 15 minute cities being "stealth lockdown zones" where people will be allocated to an area and forbidden to leave. Media literacy is dire and always has been: in the 19th century it was normal for actors playing baddies (Brutus, for instance) to get mobbed on the street, so stage doors were invented. In the 1960s, the BBC did a parody of Panorama and convinced people spaghetti grew on trees. Ghostwatch in the 90s remains a cult programme taken as evidence of the existence of ghosts by some. The difficulty epistemically speaking is that in order to know something, _anything_ about the world, there must be trustworthy sources and people able to discern who they are. In the darkest timeline, fake news foreshadows the flood of misinformation by AI and renders all knowledge so difficult to trust that we enter a new dark age. The last dark age was our illiteracy and superstitution, the next will be our own creations bewildering us so utterly that we have no idea what to believe anymore.