The Flip

By Gordon Hopkins “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” – Criswell I do not write an astrology column. Yet, I am about to pierce the veil of time and predict the future.Trust me on this. Despite a level of trust in social media that is on a par with a cat in a fish shop, it remains the primary source of news and information for a vast swath of the human race. That has allowed misinformation and propaganda and outright falsehoods to proliferate because, frankly, people lie. The internet, and especially social media, offers no practical fact checking, no quality control at all.Recently, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been added to the mix and we soon learned people are not the only ones who lie. So do machines. As AI becomes more humanlike and the amount of AI junk on social media increases exponentially, it is becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between machine generated words and people generated words, regardless of the veracity. And this is where a seismic shift in how humans relate to social media is about to occur.When you see a post on social media, do you suspect it is AI? Of course you do. But you still assume it was written by a human. Your default assumption is, a human wrote this, unless proven otherwise.At some point, possibly quite soon, that paradigm is going to flip. Your default assumption will then be that what you are reading on social media was written by a machine, unless proven otherwise. When that finally happens, and it will, your relationship to social media, along with everybody else's, will permanently change. I have no doubt this is going to happen. What I don't know is just what this new relationship with the social media, and the internet at a whole, will look like. We've all heard the term “confirmation bias.” People love to be told lies as long as they support what they already believe, or want to believe. Will people still believe those lies if they are told to them by a machine? Perhaps, but I don't think so. If not, social media won't die. People will just go back to using it the way they did in the beginning, to connect with family and friends and share cat videos. They will then all be forced to find other sources of news and information.As a man who works in the newspaper industry, perhaps this is all just wishful thinking on my part. Maybe people will be perfectly happy to be lied to by machines. In which case, heaven help the human race.

Virgil Wasserman

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