You’re not crazy. Between artificial intelligence, bots, “astroturfed” comment sections and paid promotions masquerading as authentic social media content, almost nothing in our digitized world seems real or reliable.
New research and reporting confirm it’s worse than many anticipated.
The music streaming company Deezer says that more than 40 percent of its uploaded tracks are AI-generated, according to a Washington Post article this week. This is four times more than in January 2025 and translates to 75,000 such songs uploaded daily.
Nary a long-suffering, guitar-pickin’ crooner in the bunch.
I recently spotted a neon sign in a Manhattan bistro that read: We’re all famous. Now what?
From the bunkers of our terminals and laptops, we’re all keyboard kings and queens, digital potentates with wide-ranging expertise. We’re authors, actors, poets, lawyers, scientists and columnists. The latter will enjoy job security as long as personality and voice are deemed essential to the craft, though my guess is this won’t be for much longer. Now what, indeed?
If a wannabe writer can engage a chatbot to write a novel, what’s the point of sweating out a plot or dragging characters kicking and screaming from one’s very human imagination? Why even bother when potential readers are too busy inventing their own fake fame?
The Post story offers a depressing look at the surge of AI-generated products, including more self-filed lawsuits, more scientific papers, more online content and more books. This democratization of fake “talent” is a by-product of the same internet that gave everyone a platform. We’ve seen how well that’s working out. But hiring a machine to do the work you wish you could do is cheating on a global scale. Never mind the horrors of faked scientific studies that may be used to support damaging health or environmental policies, not that we need any help in that direction.
This brings us to fake news — though not in the way President Donald Trump would have us think. A report from Vulture cites a former executive who estimates that more than 90 percent of what’s online is advertising “in disguise.” At its peak, the content distributor Floodify ran 65,000 dummy social media accounts to gin up interest in its clients, said Joe Lim, who founded the company. This meant that on a given day, Floodify posted 50,000 ads across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X, which are all supposedly the output of everyday users.
The scale of deception is overwhelming. How are regular people supposed to navigate galaxies of information in the face of such global cheating? Answer: Most can’t. Once a fake post goes viral, it becomes a credible “truth” and infects millions of people who believe, repeat and live by a lie. It’s not their fault.
Here’s a question for my fellow scrollers: How long before you realized that the dear old carpenter Ernesto, singing a heart-wrenching song about waiting by the door for his family’s return, was AI-generated? My heart broke when I figured it out. But then I thought, oh, hell, it’s a lovely song and sentiment. What’s the harm?
In short, it’s that we’ll fall for anything that bathes our brains with dopamine. But what if the content is more serious than a sad song? Manipulating emotion for pleasure isn’t much removed from propagandist tricks despots have used to encourage violence. How many clips and podcasts does it take to create a cohort of warriors in, say, the manosphere?
“Clipping” refers to pulling segments from performances, podcasts or other venues and collating them for mass consumption — a booming new industry for companies specializing in branding. Free-ranging fame-seekers have so flooded the digital zone that even people as wildly successful as Justin Bieber have surrendered to the fray. Someone hired a clipping service to distribute social-media-friendly clips of his Coachella performance, for example. The result was an astronomical number of views, feeds, clicks and yet more fame.
The machines would seem to be winning, but there’s a bright side. Most of the books being written by AI are e-books that don’t sell as well as real books. ArXiv, a site that allows researchers to post papers, has tightened rules for publication and could ban users for a year if they are found to be using AI. Spotify gives badges to songs to indicate they’re not AI-generated.
The increasing number of people using AI to file lawsuits poses a more daunting problem because it could clog the courts. And the media, by reporting on influencers and trends, helps make the unimportant seem important, thus exacerbating the problem of lucrative lying. Worse, it elevates bad actors who seem newsworthy but can use fame in harmful ways.
This seemingly unstoppable system of rewards and no punishment for unethical behavior in the giddy service of self-aggrandizement may predict the end of civilization as we know it. Or not. Certainly, no democratic republic can survive without a well-informed citizenry. We are anything but that already. In the course of amusing ourselves to death, as Neil Postman put it in his 1985 book of the same name, we are trading knowledge for entertainment at our terrible peril — and he’d seen nothing yet.
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