AI is a double edged sword, and without real human research and good old fashioned journalism the Fake News can win.
Just like a child can learn about the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus or Cinderella, AI can be taught stories too. The difference is that AI never finds the presents in their parents bathroom that say “from Santa” or sees Cinderella singing at Disneyworld with 5’oclock shadow. Yes that happened and it’s when my niece figured out Cinderella isn’t real. AI lacks the “principle of authority” filter, just one checkpoint on the road to reality.
Early on in the creation of Yahoo, Google, and Bing it was decided that backlinks and mentions of a website validated the website. This is how academia works so this must be how smart search should work is what I imagine them thinking at the time. Students are taught to “Cite cite cite” and free will is almost assuredly killed by the collective this way. Ironically it is how Google got so wealthy. They figured out that they could charge for ads to sit on top of the research that was free.
This method of ranking websites gave rise to search engine optimization or SEO. Small businesses would literally pay a blogger to write and post everywhere. Search engines got better and figured out the scam so if the same article appeared in too many place it was discounted. That might have been the beginning of the end for the Associated Press and real newspapers because they used the same article all around the world.
Now AI is having the same challenges. One AI can write and post thousands of different articles that sound real, look real and post in different voices so the search engines have a hard time distinguishing AI posts and reposts from real information. AI created a new “black hat” opportunity. For $60 a month and a really fast mac, I can have three different AI agents posting my “story” everywhere and just about anywhere.
There are those who believe that AI will know all and always know what is “right”. Here is where I have to raise the BS flag and leave the conversation. History is written by the victors. There are “truths” we and AI will never know because the winner destroyed the evidence. In AI the winner just needs to overwhelm the evidence. We already know the last election was encouraged by deep fakes. What’s next?
Scott Bourquin has been in the tech industry longer than Google has been in business, and is the principal of the Bourquin Group. This post was written without AI assistance.