AI is flooding the world with fake content and fake books on how to get rich or to how to program better. Once you’ve found an AI author on Amazon, with fake face and fake bio, then Amazon will recommend you a range of other AI fake authors. AI can churn out books in the blink of an eye. If you write a popular book, AI will write fake workbooks to accompany your book, riddled with lies and errors. When a celebrity or even semi-celebrity dies, the next morning AI will have a book published on them, full of lies, misquotes and misinformation. Small publishers are saying they’re being so overwhelmed by a deluge of AI-generated fake submissions, they’re considering shutting down. AI overwhelms.

This flood of low-quality and fake content from AI is particularly affecting minor languages, which don’t have a lot of original content published on the Web to begin with. A lot of content initially gets written in major languages such as English, and then, if it is translated at all into minor languages, it is usually done by machine translation. AI acts as a type of hyper machine translation. These minor languages then become overwhelmed by AI translations and other fake AI content.

As the overall percentage of AI-generated content continues to grow, it poses problems for AI itself. AI begins to feed on itself. AI begins to train and learn from its own crap. They call this “Model Collapse” because the quality will continuously decline and all sorts of weird things will begin to happen. If AI were a digestive system, it would have a tube going from its anus to its mouth. It would be a digestive system with no capacity to poop, no capacity to remove toxic waste.

AI is not simply faking the present and the future. It is rewriting the past. Nothing new here. History has always been written—or certainly heavily influenced by—the victor. For the propagandist, though, AI is an incredibly useful tool that can revise history on an industrial scale. Like Stalin on steroids, it can remove inconvenient faces from old photographs, change bios, rewrite historical laws—whatever today’s autocrat or trumpian dictator is having.

Lots of people like AI content. It’s sugary, sweet. It’s adrenaline boosting. It’s confident in that white, male way, and it sounds like it’s correct. It has all your favorite words. It knows how to press your buttons, caress your ego, feed your fears. It’s been perfectly optimized to grab your attention. It fits neatly into an entire online advertising industry that is using all the psychological science available and the huge mounds of data it has on you, to target you and get you to click, to get you to believe, to get you to intensely feel for a moment long enough to get you to buy or act in the way the advertiser wants. AI will figure out the words that mean most to you and the images that mean most to you and the people that mean most to you and the places that mean most to you, and it will target you with all those things, honing and tweaking its message based on how you respond. Yes, your very own AI-generated newspaper and worldview. Nobody else gets the copy that you get. Does that scare you? It should.