The following is an excerpt from The Honest Broker.

“The problems among sane, healthy people may be even worse than among the psychically fragile. These stable individuals are essential to the smooth running of society—but they will no longer have a shared basis of understanding they can communicate to others…Consider those loonies who believe that the Apollo moon landing never happened. Now imagine a world in which everybody is like that about everything—because nothing can be proven…I also have hope that technologies with built-in documentation and resilient safeguards—maybe like a blockchain or the Internet Archive—can help us. We absolutely need more and better technologies like this.”

One might think that the now mainstream news of AI-induced delusions and psychosis are the only damages to address in the recent widespread adoption of generative-AI. However, Ted Gioia has hit on something which may soon impact each and every one of us: uncertainty.

Is this history article I’m reading true or altered? What about its images?

Are the live actors in this movie real or generated?

Is this music truly written by this musician or was it generated?

Is this picture of my friend on a mountaintop a real experience they had?

Was this encouraging email written by my student actually written by them (and therefore valuable, or not)?

Is the man I’ve fallen in love with through online dating real, or is it someone else using AI to create a new voice, face, and write me loquacious poems?

Earlier this year one of our founders sat for a virtual job interview and left wondering if the unusual man “Bobby” had actually been AI-generated, but it was too difficult to tell. He seemed real, however a few things just felt “off” about the interview, including the man’s name, accent, and diction.

In his helpful articulations, Gioia speaks to what is fundamental in Human Creative’s own solution to these problems: built-in documentation, blockchain, archiving, monitoring, and proving what is true. Human Creative’s tagline is Preserving Trust & Originality, because when doubts arise we will all need a way forward to reclaim trust. When things turn dizzyingly fabricated we will all need at least one way to know that what we see, touch, read, hear, and know is real.

To read the full article, click here.

P.S. This post was written without the use of generative-AI. But wouldn’t you like to know for sure…?