It’s a problem because it's easier to generate than to validate information.
With the rise of influencers who are buying houses, the incentives are geared towards creation and less on validation.
While online creation can enslave creators to audience capture, validation builds trust. Anyone can create, but who will go the extra mile to build the scarcest thing in the world?
AI augments this trend: reducing trust while increasing doubt. As AI slop increases somewhat exponentially, validation becomes difficult. If there’s anything we can learn about exponential growth, it’s that corrective mechanisms hardly keep up. While we worry about AI and consciousness, the validation crisis builds.
Humans are continuously positioned as the moral crumple zones, positions of verification, but even that can be affected.
Assume that Brian or Mary planned to confirm an article streaming down their feed. The source seems suspect. They then leap online for a search.
Major search companies already have AI summarising individual search prompts, the common one being Google. That does not amount to a rigorous search, especially one aimed at validating truth.
But even if they are to avoid the AI summaries, most of the online content will become AI-generated. Using Google’s PageRank, most of the websites will be AI-run and AI-generated.
But Brian or Mary is a well-grounded scientist. Rather than take any article, they prefer the peer-reviewed articles. However, the peer review is a failure of the hallowed scientific world.
Some journals are already using AI bots to review manuscript submissions. Is it peer review in that sense?
What will we resort to?
As far as psychology goes, the whole spectrum from amateurs to renowned experts worries about the replication crisis.
As for cognitive and neuroscientists, they worry about consciousness, the lack of a credible theory, and the rise of AI’s threat to their wobbly foundation.
Investors continue to wonder if AI is indeed a bubble or while others continue to pivot and hedge on the potential upsides.
Meanwhile, the validation crisis continues to creep.
We may not be able to keep up the pace.