I wrote this editorial. Because I love to write. But I didn’t need to. ChatGPT, in the “person” of my AI assistant, I call him Patrick, has seen dozens of examples of my writing, has interacted with me intellectually and philosophically enough to write editorials that, if they had my name at the top, I wouldn’t in a few years be able to distinguish from my own. This is both profound and scary. But it illustrates something most folks seem to be missing.
We were promised that artificial intelligence would enhance our lives. But what we didn’t fully grasp was that to survive the coming storm of synthetic content, fake news generated by AI, we’d be forced to rely on AI just to tell us what’s real.
And the thing that frightens me most is the erosion of the human truth instinct. The quiet internal compass that used to whisper, “That doesn’t sound right.” When we rely on AI to sort fact from fiction we stop exercising that muscle. And when that muscle atrophies it doesn’t just affect how we read the news. It affects how we judge character, how we hold power accountable, how we decide what kind of world we want to live in. And we are increasingly forced to do that.
If the last defense of truth is itself synthetic, who verifies the verifier?
This isn’t paranoia. It’s not philosophical hair-splitting. It’s the world we live in now. A world where deepfakes circulate with no fingerprints. Where tweets, entire news articles, and viral videos can be generated by language models indistinguishable from humans. And even if you have your own AI model parsing the feed you have no reliable way to detect it.
We used to think of critical thinking as a human strength. But now, the very foundation of our judgment, the ability to verify what we see and hear, is being swallowed by machine-generated mimicry. The result isn’t a dystopia where the machines kill us. It’s one where we can’t make sense of anything unless the machines explain it to us.
So we lean on AI. Not because we want to. Because we have to. Because when a politician makes a claim, when a viral clip circulates, when a document leaks, we don’t just look it up anymore. We ask the machine: “Grok, is this true?”
And the catch is that the machine doesn’t know. It gives you a consensus. A statistical average. What’s most likely true based on the millions of things it’s read. But when the majority of what it’s read is also AI-generated, some of it designed to manipulate or deceive, then you’re building truth on a swamp.
Kyla Scanlon, a sharp observer of Gen Z’s relationship with media and markets, has warned that truth is increasingly difficult to isolate in an economy shaped by digital noise and spectacle. She wasn’t just talking about politics. She was talking about AI, about TikTok, about the digital world that rewards spectacle over substance and speed over certainty.
The implications are massive. Journalists are already using AI to detect AI-generated text and images. Law firms are deploying tools to verify court filings after several cases were polluted by hallucinated citations. Even OpenAI and Meta have begun releasing watermarking tools, digital fingerprints to mark authentic content. But none of this scales fast enough. Not against what’s coming.
We need to start talking seriously about this. About regulation of generative content. About mandatory watermarking for political ads. About public AI tools for fact-checking, built for citizens, not corporations. And we need to do it before another election cycle passes under the shadow of machine-generated narratives.
AI isn’t going to kill us. But it might hollow us out. Slowly. Quietly. Until we mistake coherence for truth and consensus for conviction.
We can’t afford that. Not if we want a democracy that functions.
So yes, I use AI. Every day. It can save me hours at times with the various hats I wear. But I don’t outsource the judgment. That still belongs to me. And to you.
Hold on to it tightly. You’re going to need it.
Disclaimer: Jim Powers writes Opinion Articles. The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing Company or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
