Considerations on Infomation Processing in the Age of AI

I’ve been thinking a little recently about open-source AI and its inevitable impact on the information environment and thought I’d share a process (principle and practice) that has held me in good stead over the last few tumultuous years that I’ll be doubling down on in the coming period. It is a process that has helped me remain sane (mostly), avoid narrative capture (to a greater extent), and from disappearing down conspiratorial rabbit holes (thankfully).

Principle

Simply put, the principle is to question EVERYTHING. To take an unapologetically critical approach to ALL media sources: both mainstream and alternative. But particularly alternative sources. While the social-financial-ideological biases and failure conditions intrinsic to mainstream media (which will no doubt be exacerbated by AI) are pretty apparent to most media-savvy consumers, there are a different set of not-quite-so-obvious pressures in the alternative media landscape which will also become increasingly problematic as content producers start utilising this tech.

There are a whole host of issues I could mention here, but I will just touch on the three I consider most problematic. The first is ‘audience capture’, a phenomenon whereby content producers (usually for financial reasons) bend their output to better serve the…