Post-Truth and an Anti-Intellectual Society

and how AI is making it worse

Whether we like it or not, the AI equivalent of pandora’s box has been opened, and like a train without a conductor, no one can stop it - we’re all aboard full steam ahead. Seemingly, no one asked for it either. At least, no one in the working class wanted this. At first it was shiny, new, and exciting. It was pitched to all of us as something that can make our everyday lives way better. It can write those pesky cover letters, or help you find information quickly, solve problems in your everyday life that take up way too much of your time.

But then it started making art, copywriting, and coding, and people started losing their jobs faster than we thought. Then the things we used in our everyday lives started breaking because as it turns out, AI isn’t as smart as it had been pitched to us.

Now we can’t even trust Google for information because the AI-generated responses are often incorrect. We have to dig way more than we have ever had to in Google’s 26 years in order to find the answer we’re looking for. The recipes we find online might not even work because the image (and maybe the recipe itself) was AI-generated. We’re all desperately seeking reality, and it’s becoming increasingly rare.

And while I would like to blame our post-truth society on AI entirely, I think it’s only highlighting our society’s lack of trust in everything. It was already difficult for some, especially the older generations, to determine what is real and what is fake on the internet - not all of us had the luxury of media literacy courses.

Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would sunset their fact checking program, and instead utilize community notes much like Twitter (X) uses. Verbatim, he said that fact checking has become “too political.” I cannot even begin to wrap my head around how the truth could ever be political, when facts are undisputed. That’s quite literally the definition of a “fact.”

This was announced right after Instagram launched their AI user profiles, by the way.

Hearing this drives me absolutely mad, especially after closing my Twitter account because I couldn’t stand the unfiltered, fictitious, anti-intellectual rhetoric being shoved down my throat constantly on the platform. One woman had recently gone viral after sharing her well-earned achievement of completing her PhD, and getting absolutely slammed by users telling her that her work was dumb and a waste of time. It’s clear that our society no longer values education.

To top it all off, we’re now facing the closure of the Department of Education. We’re so beyond cooked. We’re fried.

All bets are off. Anything can be AI generated and it’s only going to get harder to determine what’s real and what’s fake, even for the more advanced users eventually. Unfortunately, I can only see this as the technology consuming itself, and we’re on track for Dead Internet Theory becoming more than just a theory. We went from having all of the information at our fingertips to having virtually nothing. Like the Internet’s version of the Library of Alexandria.

Eventually, everyone will tire of trying to decipher what is reality. At least, that would be the only best case scenario I can think of. They’ll go back to books and libraries if they can’t determine what’s real online. They’ll log off entirely and touch some grass because that’s the only realness they’ll be able to find. Maybe we’ll go out into our communities again and find genuine connections. One can only hope but until then, best of luck.