Still can't. "ChatGPT can make mistakes." People still trust it, doesn't mean they should. Wiki's not as bad of a tertiary source as it used to be, but it's still a tertiary source and you had a research assignment. Even official authoritative sources can be un/intentionally wrong.
> You should never date someone you met through an app or website because they are 100% murderers.
This remains sound advice that teachers should continue giving children. Even (or morso) now that online dating has been normalized in the meantime. Do I have to explain?
Not saying that tech is inherently evil, these could have been prevented, but to me it seems we have underestimated the social risks and failed to regulate accordingly.
That said, while I am generally skeptical of these effects, fake news are a real problem that social media has exacerbated.
If the internet saves 1,000 lives per day, and hurts 1, then the roi is there.
What are the positives? Before, you had to go to a doctor to do stuff, now you do too. Maybe people are more likely to get tested. Maybe scheduling appointments is a bit better. What am I missing?
There are plenty of documented cases of reddit posts encouraging deeper investigations or legally authorized tele-health providers (where you can communicate directly with a licensed medical professional).
The number of people using telehealth services is significantly less than the number of people that have bad health outcomes from internet usage. If it were otherwise, ChatGPT, Reddit, and telehealth companies would be managed very differently.
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doctor on demand has millions of users
Its seems to be hidden from view. Global health is getting worse, not better
Covid pushed back the longevity gains, but there hasn't be a decline or flatten since the internet grew in popularity (2000 - 2019).
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-globa...
Obesity continues to increase everywhere, and is a leading indicator for poor health outcomes over time.
I think the inability to see the freedom AI gives people is one of the saddest things I've seen.
I remember when the internet was young people would complain about how it was becoming read-only.
Now we have a tool to let people express themselves and people complain the fact there are fake pics on AirBNB means the collapse of society. Please!
No one’s failing to see the good things, hypothetical or not. Most of us are aware just fine, we just don’t all agree that the negative trade-offs are worth it.
We’re in an era now where every image and video (and for that matter audio) is potentially fake; where knowing what’s real and true is no longer possible.
Have you not seen the old Soviet photos where people who fell out of favour were erased from photos?
Media literacy has always been about working out if you can trust something.
Now the ability to edit has been democratised. I choose to celebrate that.
This was always the case. Spin and propaganda are not new, the way it's conveyed has just become a bit easier. People are not as susceptible to misinformation as most assume, they recalibrate how much stock they put into the things they see based on the quality of the information environment. Basically everyone knows now that the internet has a low signal to noise ratio.
20 years ago your misinformation came from television, radio, and print. All of those things were expensive to produce and there was an implicit need for them to be at least vaguely believable and reliable, because their existence depended on it to continually generate revenue.
- Today, a single person produce 100% AI-generated media for basically the cost of their time.
- That media is as high quality as anything else out there.
- Social media platforms provide the delivery system for free.
- There's no real way to tell if there's even a real person behind the name/pseudonym used for posting it. It might be a person, it might be an algorithm, it might be a nation-state. You have no way to know.
Coincidentally, this is at the top of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355751
It's more about using LLMs to impersonate someone, but the point stands.
That's not about technology but is a fundamental moral issue.
It's that the powers-that-be have and always will have more resources to bring to bear than the individual will have to combat them. And right now we're moving at absolute break-neck speed to invent technologies that can be used undermine us individually as well as collectively at ease and scales heretofore never seen.
I believed for a long time that the information age would be the great liberator - the great balancer. But we're on the precipice right now of governmental and societal collapsem and it has everything to do with the massive proliferation and preponderance of either misinformation, or agenda-aligned (shaped) information.
Anti-vax, Antifa, ACAB, conspirituality, QAnon, etc., etc., have all had an enormously negative impact, and we're still in misinformation infancy, and lucky that the leadership in goverment is so old that they're not particularly great at bending these technologies to bear on us. But that's not always going to be the case.
Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051221150412
> It's more about using LLMs to impersonate someone, but the point stands.
I personally knew someone that fell for the Nigerian prince scam 20 years ago. Same old tricks, just recycled in a new medium.
Slate published this about it in 2012: https://slate.com/technology/2012/03/narrative-science-robot...
For as long as we've had computers people have tried to make them sound human. It's not a new thing that people are concerned about knowing if they're talking to (or reading) a robot imitating a person.
Back in the day, baseball commentators sometimes did this for live games they couldn't see based on very limited information they were being passed. One such commentator was .. Ronald Reagan.
I was surprised how well it worked, even then.
Motivated actors have been able to doctor, fake, or spin media content since time immemorial. But peoples default mode was to trust what they saw. Now that fake imagery is ubiquitous, maybe we'll all get a bit more skeptical.
Boy do I wish that were the case. Investigative journalism is rare now and instead favours activist journalism, public debate is hard (but getting better), and institutional trust is at all time lows, for various reasons.
People will muddle through regardless, we're not as fragile as most assume.
All of which are under serious threat from social media, buyouts by billionaires, and simple smear campaigns. Not dependent on AI, but effects which will be magnified by AI.
Here's a local story published after I made my comment, about tour operators using AI images to misrepresent destinations in the area: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-01/ai-videos-spark-conce...
Increasing the availability of fake image generators directly enables more harms like these.
Now images have gone back to being like a book. People are beginning to assume anyone can write anything, make up quotes, etc. We still get to keep the ones we just like or the ones we know were really that way (e.g. your wedding vows/wedding photos) but we've dropped this silly notion image=fact just because it's an image. It's not all good that faking an image has gotten consistently easier over the last 100 years, but it's also not bad that it's fallen apart enough people are seeing through it.
You could never trust ANYTHING you read or see on the internet, this isn't new. There are thousands of old hoaxes that many people still believe.
This is seriously underplaying it. It's become trivial to generate and inundate the internet with fake content (either for laughs, for internet points, or for more nefarious purposes). Manipulating photos required a lot of skill to make something plausible. We're reaching a point (if we're not there yet) where most content produced on the internet is fake.
I understand the point of distorted facts, but what I’m not sure how things are improved by basically having no trust in any facts?
I personally worry that what that would mean is we are left with little to no institutions to trust, besides Universities and family members, I don't think I would be able to trust governments and corporations, but I guess before internet people also weren't blindly trusting those.
One implication was people were more social and talked about ideas more. Thought had not been outsourced to arbiters in the way that it was in the U.S. People with authority, knowledge, and close family members were definitely inputs into what people thought, but by-and-large people still came to their own conclusions.
You got to see the gradient of thought that people actually had about issues. People would say their insane ideas out loud. You could disagree with people and have them actually engage with your perception of reality.
It was strictly better in my opinion.
Low information trust societies get destroyed by pandemics of both physical viruses (due to anti-vax and medical distrust; we can see this happening again with Ebola) and destructive memetic lies (see 20th century fascism).
Moving there, I was shocked at how "conspiratorial" everybody seemed about everything. Living there, I was shocked out how often they were right. But it didn't impact people's likelihood to do things. I think they are actually orthogonal in a way that is unintuitive.
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A high information trust society has regulation in place which tracks such acts of manipulation so that this trust is not abused (e.g. regulation against misleading/false advertising).
A low information society promotes the notion that everyone is lying anyway and everyone is on his own to figure out what's true. So regulation gets dismantled, and the premise becomes "it's not lying if I can make enough people believe it".
“which plays on this general tendency of humans to prefer comfort over challenge, confirmation over rejection.”
This is completely and observably wrong. It reads like it would make sense, but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.
I lived in societies of high and low information trust, and observed first-hand what happens on transition. If trust in public information is high, people contribute and challenge common sources of information, and there is high expectation and punishment to rectify, improving the quality and transparency of commonly agreed information.
In low trust environments, people start to distrust everything, initially seek out explanations but then largely gravitate towards information sources which confirm their assumptions or own bias, because they lack time, energy and skills for any other path. To stabilize themselves, they then build a mental "fortress" around their belief which is periodically fostered not by challenging it but by seeking out others who confirm it.
Advancing in this direction increases the general consensus that there is no common ground (because this requires common trust in some information source), it gets increasingly difficult to educate such fractured groups, because there is no longer a path for many to accept inconvenient truth in light of a more convenient "alternative truth".
This is poisonous in a democracy, because common agreement on facts is what's so crucial for this process.
Hence my learning that it's not a healthy direction for a society (and also the reason why systems attacking democracies don't aim to gain trust, they build distrust)
> but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.
There is a huge difference between a ideologically open society and a low information trust society. Accepting other ideologies requires trust.
A low information trust society breaks down trust not just in institutions but also among citizens, which is the fertile ground for polarization and actively prevents open ideology.
You may have the wrong understanding of the terminology. A high-information-trust society doesn't mean that everyone blindly accepts a leader, it describes a system where trust is maintained. In a functioning democracy this happens because society constantly challenges institutions, as it DEMANDS to be able to trust them.
In low-information-trust systems, the consensus is that no one can be trusted. So no joint effort is taken to hold power accountable, everyone plays to his own fraction which erodes common grounds, solidarity and citizen power.