Well Bottom Blues

I woke up from a disturbing Epic Dream and in the immediate manic aftermatth this occurred to me: by using social media are we voluntarily becoming entangled in AI hallucinations? I watch Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Startalk a good bit and interviews featuring particle physicist Richard Pembroke. I heard Pembroke last night in an interview talking about social media and how it became unreliable because of its unmediated publication of unreliable information and that AI was making this worse.

And then I remembered an ad I saw yesterday about seeing the imminent stellar nova not of a star given by its catalog name but by some name like “the kaboom star.” Watching reputable science reporting and discussion online does not make me an expert on anything but I believe it’s an intelligent assumption that mainstream science is nowhere near being able to predict the date a star will go nova. This was clearly not from a reliable source so I immediately blocked it.  

What if this ad from an online  purveyor of “science”  was not just human designed clickbait but an example of an AI hallucination inside the algorirhm? What if on top of the deliberate misinformation and algorithmic rage bait social media began to fill up also with AI hallucinations superficially resembling reality-based information?  What happens when the post-truth era becomes the post-reality era? How will a society that receives so much of its news and information in that environment function? Or further malfunction?