In his recent arstechnica.com article, a famous AI observer Benj Edwards gives a precise (and a bit scary) definition to the time in history that we all are entering these days: he calls it the “age of media skepticism”, or the era of “deep doubt”, meaning that, due to the advent of AI, it has become too easy to generate convincing fake content, and we are going to “face a tremendous flood of AI-generated scenes denying practically every real documentary evidence”. This is going to cause a counterwave of skepticism toward online content, of course. But how will modern society differentiate real news from the fake ones? How are we going to screen masses of incoming information and find out what is true and what is scam?

Faking an image, a video, or any other piece of information has become a matter of seconds. Every user, even a kid, can do it from their home computer or a phone. No matter if this is done just for fun or with a certain intention, it is going to affect our minds and emotions.

The shift toward living in the environment of continuous suspicion of fraud and scam is going to change human behavior and our general looks on life, work, social activities and everything we do. The attitude of skepticism and deep doubt toward all information we read or hear – not just the information that comes through media, but general skepticism toward any information at all, is going to change the way we communicate with each other. I don’t think many of us realize what a dangerous time we are facing, and it may become a reality quite soon.

Imagine living in the world where nothing is really true, nothing is rock hard and you can’t be sure in anything you read or hear unless you see or touch it by yourself, where the only true world is the one that lies within the area of your direct vision… Hmm, it sounds like returning to the stone age, but with the gadgets at hand… Imagine having the ability to read or watch episodes about the things going on in any place on the planet, but having no trust in that information, because it is a 50×50 probability that it may be true or false. What will you do?

Since the beginning of human society, people have always been drawn to creating a belief in something. Our brain needs to rely on something unshakable, from which it can push off and build further reasoning. This is why we seek faith; this is why it is typical of humans to seek God or any other belief that can help us feel more or less safe in the world of the unknown.

I have no answers to the questions I asked here, but I am hoping to live to the moment when society creates principles regulating the dangerous influence of options of information processing which we have acquired along with the development of AI technologies.