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@tinker Neal Stephenson released a book back in 2019 called Fall, or Dodge in Hell.

In it, and this is mild spoilers for the first chapter of the book, someone released a bot into the wild that could effortlessly simulate a real person writing real text in order to. . .well, do a thing (I'll keep the spoilers light).

The book fast forwards to a little while later, and people generally hire "editors" to curate the stream of information they get, because the bot had multiplied and made most of the web functionally useless.

These editors didn't have the job of finding what was. . ."real". Their job was to curate a feed that their customers would appreciate.

Some customers appreciated the truth, whether it was friendly to their worldview or not, but plenty of folks subscribed to editor feeds that just pushed the narrative of whatever ideology they, themselves, subscribed to.

When I read this book in early 2022, I thought that this concept was really neat, and man, it'll suck if that happens. I was more impressed that he seemed to predict a lot of what would happen with "simple" misinformation _the very next year_ during COVID.

Then ChatGPT happened and I realized Neal Stephenson had predicted the gods-damned future.