Evil

When you see evil operating in real time

In my daily work, I use AI quite religiously. When I need a quick information download of something that I know nothing about for example. AIs typically summarize from multiple website and kind of function like wikipedia for me.

Let’s state it this way. I love how AI supports me like an assistant. I actually built myself an agent that does research for me. It is wonderful. I called him Mr. Wonderful. He helps me ask the right questions, he pulls from various weekly paper that my company publishes and ties my own data to the corporate objectives and then… writes reports for me. Well, the initial draft. I still have to put in the work to fact check and make sure the report is sound. But man, what took me days, is now a question of hours.

I see other people (in particular on X) to use AI differently. They use AI like a truth teller. A dictionary of some sort. A lot of people have basically replaced independent research with asking Grok. They do not question anything.

You see it all the time when someone states an opinion or fact on X. Someone in the reply section will ask “Grok, is this true”, and Grok will provide an answer that is then taken at face value.

But AI is not an ultimate truth teller. AI is swayed by the information it finds online. And if it finds something often enough, it declares it to be factual. This is how the rumor that the Charlie Kirk shooter had MAGA affiliation spread like a wildfire. The more people claimed it was true, the more Grok or other AI picked up that story line as true, the more people believed it. A vicious cycle.

When on Sunday Charlie’s memorial was held, the German side of my X feed went crazy. Not surprisingly crazy. But more than what I naturally would have expected. Yes, I have a German side to my X feed. It mirrors what I see on the US side, but is way, way more left leaning. It is basically thousands of idiots claiming that being anti-fascist is the only right way of being and that anyone who is not calling themselves Antifa is a bad and evil person. I do not follow any of them. They just show up. Day after day.

Since Sunday, these people claimed the Charlie Kirk memorial was a Nazi rally. Not just like one. A real one.

They did this by showing side by side pictures of Hitler at a rally compared to Trump at the funeral.

They even went so far as to take quotes from Erika Kirk around forgiveness and showed a verbatim quote from a real Nazi, mostly Hitler. There were many of these fake and made up quotes.

Let me be clear. People published fake quotes pretending that the people speaking at Charlie’s funeral were fully fascists and were basically not speaking from the heart but quoting literal Nazis. These quotes are an absolute lie. A blatant one.

At first I was like. This is dumb. Why would they do this?

Then…

I was drinking a glass of wine late at night and suddenly it hit me.

“They are feeding the AI!”

I nearly screamed at my husband. He did not understand. No wonder. I was completely speaking out of context. So I had to explain.

“Evil people are feeding the AI with fake quotes and fake analogies, so the AIs are picking this up and are declaring everything the right is doing fascist. They are forcing it to be “true”.”

If you just state something often enough, AI believes it to be factual.

We have reached it.

The point of no return.

In 10 years, we will no longer know what is true or false. We will no longer have a factual objective truth or a shared reality. The more AI is being used and replaces google and independent research, the more we will be pushed further down the rabbit hole of a world we no longer can trust.

Maybe I am too optimistic. With how rapid AI took over and made people lazy to search for their own data, maybe we are already there. Maybe it will be another year.

Who knows.

What I do know is that people (in particular on the left) have found AI to be a useful tool to make their lies be read as true.

And that is scary.