My teenage neighbor burst into my living room a few days ago. He had his phone in his hand, and his face lit up with the kind of enthusiasm which is only possible when you still believe the internet shows you the world as it is. “Check this out” he said, when he shoved the screen toward me. There was a capybara*, looping endlessly, which was half-submerged, and eerily upright, and treading water with the precision of a well-trained human swimmer. “I didn’t know they could do that”, is what he added, and he was fully convinced that he had uncovered some obscure biological wonder.
I wanted to believe him.
But I’ve seen too much of what’s cooking on the internet to be baffled by anything these days.
Ah, teenagers, those poor naive souls who are navigating an internet that has abandoned reality, are coming to the grim realization that they can’t trust what they see.
A recent study from Common Sense Media confirms what they already suspect: 46% of teens know when they have been deceived by online content, and 54% say they have encountered visuals that were misleading despite being presented as “real”. AI-generated images and videos are now flood their screens which are slipping into the mix of memes, and news.
The result … is a generation that is raised to question their own eyes.
*That’s a big rat/guinea pig
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The fabrication of truth
I think that these numbers are very grim. Because nearly half of the surveyed teens admit that they have been misled by online content, and a solid 54% have seen “real” images that were actually anything but.
This is not an erosion of trust, people.
This is a full-scale epistemological collapse.
Ok, some kids will think that they have an ironclad radar for spotting AI fakes, but let’s be honest… Just look at your own feed on the grups media – like Faeces book and Instagram. My timeline is cluttered with AI generated slop, and it is getting better (as in mimicing the ‘real’ thing), and our perception is getting worse.
This isn’t the early days of AI anymore, where hands had 15 fingers and bodies had 3 legs, and faces melted into digital pudding. AI-generated images these days, have pores, and imperfections, and eerie believability. And the only thing that is keeping some of these fabrications from absolute dominance is the anatomical mistakes they sometimes make. But give it a year, and a bit of Stargate* and even that failsafe will vanish.
Robbie Torney is a guy from Common Sense Media who did the research, and he put it rather gently: “Many kids don’t see flaws they aren’t trained to detect”. That’s a polite way of saying that they are as gullible as f*k, and unless you’re running high-level forensic analysis on every meme you see, you’re screwed.
Seeing isn’t believing
At some point, you have to wonder…how much of the internet is actually real anymore? Well, here’s a fun statistic to keep you up at night: 57% of the content on the internet is AI-generated slop. More than half of what you scroll through, argue over, and consume daily is digitally generated nonsense which is created by machines that don’t even know what a capybara is.
Let’s put that into perspective.
If more than half of the internet is synthetic nonsense, and the rest is people reacting to that nonsense, then what even is “reality” in the online world? This is like living in a hall of mirrors where every reflection is slightly wrong, but you’re not quite sure how. And the scary thing about this development is that AI is only getting better at making those mirrors indistinguishable from the real thing.
The good thing for now is that AI doesn’t have an agenda. It is just vomiting out content at an industrial scale. The problem isn’t that AI is trying to deceive us. It is that it doesn’t care whether it’s telling the truth or not. And when more than half of the content we consume comes from something that fundamentally doesn’t understand truth, well… good luck maintaining a grip on reality.
Talking about scale.. The total indexed part of the internet (that is the bit that we can “see”, so not the deep/dark web) is around 1200 petabytes. 1200 PB is 1,2 billion Gb. And if you would include the murky deep Mariana Trench (which I’m not going to do), that adds up to a total of 64 zettabytes. 64 ZB is a staggering 64 million PB!!! So if 57% of the internet is slop, that would amount to a total off 684 PB. And if I convert it to GB the results is a staggering 38,000,000,000,000 Gigabytes (38 trillion Gigabytes).
Now let’s take this totally useless “exercise” just one step further. Let’s figure out how many hours of real music you can squeeze into 38 trillion Gb of slop. For this I had to ask my good ol’ Ayahusaca loving friend Chad (GPT) to help me out:
So, here’s the blatant copy .
Step 1: Estimate Music File Size per Hour
A standard MP3 file at 320 kbps (high-quality) is about 144 MB per hour of audio.
Step 2: Convert GB to Hours of Music
1 GB = 1,000 MB
So, 1 GB of MP3 (320 kbps) holds:
Step 3: Apply to 38 Trillion GB
MP3 (320 kbps):
Step 4: Convert to Years
MP3:
Final Answer:
If we turned all the slop of the internet into MP3s*, we could listen to music for 30 billion years nonstop. That’s about twice the age of the universe.
Hahahahaha, now that is long enough to suffer through an infinite loop of Nickelback and still have time left for some Beethoven.
*In pure movie-time, that’s 2 billion years of 1080p cinematic sludge, basically the entire filmography of Nicolas Cage, including every movie he hasn’t made yet. 😂
The doubt is spreading like a virus
For the unfortunate souls growing up in this landscape, trust is rapidly becoming a relic. More than 70% of surveyed teens admit that seeing deceptive content has fundamentally changed the way they see the world. They now approach images with the same skepticism as a my Weiner sniffing an unfamiliar object.
But this is going beyond the internet now.
The doubt is spreading like a virus. It is infecting institutions, authority figures, and even relationships between them. Teens are now even side-eyeing textbooks in class and they are questioning the very fabric of history.
Honestly? Can you blame them? When your entire life is spent watching the truth dissolve in real time, skepticism i quite logical – and necessary for survival I guess.
You know the saying we used to say “seeing is believing”?
Now, seeing is a joke.
And when reality is optional, what exactly are we left with?
The loneliest generation
The thing is, people, that the internet was supposed to connect us, when you ask its original founders like Tim B. Lee, but it turns out that when half of it is artificial, the only thing that it is doing is isolating us further. I’ve always considered memes to be cultural currency, you know, inside jokes, shared experiences, a way to bond over collective absurdity. But what happens when those jokes aren’t even made by humans anymore? When the things we laugh at, share, and connect over are manufactured by mediocre algorithms who are designed to keep us engaged but never truly understood?
Teenagers are already lonelier than any previous generation.
No, I need to correct that.
They are not lonely, they are adrift.
The things that once tethered them to each other, lke shared experiences, a common version of reality, those are all dissolving under the weight of AI’s content flood.
And what is left is doubt, and a sense that nothing is real anymore. And when nothing is real, how do you make real connections?
The mirage of fixes
The Common Sense study comes up with a solution: watermarking AI-generated content.
A label, a warning, a little heads-up that states, “Hey, this is a load of crap”.
It’s a nice thought, but labels don’t stop anyone. People still eat junk food despite the massive warning signs about diabetes and heart disease. They still smoke even with pictures of blackened lungs slapped on every pack. A tiny “AI-generated” tag on an image is not going to fix the fundamental issue of the fact that the internet is now an unfiltered torrent of manufactured reality, and no one is able to stop the flood.
Torney suggests that media literacy is the answer. That people should just learn to question everything, approach content with a critical eye, and ask “who made this” and “why”.
That’s adorable. But also completely delusional. Expecting every teenager to apply rigorous analysis to every image they see is like expecting myself to read the terms and conditions before clicking “I Agree” to every new subscription I “need”.
It’s a fantasy.
So people, this is the world that AI is building. A world where reality is malleable, and truth is just another content stream, and all are indistinguishable from the lies. The long-term effects of it will be that we’re looking at a generation growing up in perpetual doubt, who will be questioning everything, believing nothing, and ultimately disengaging from the idea of truth altogether.
Let this sink in for a few secs.
Because if you can’t trust what you see, what you read, or what you know, then what’s left?
Nothing.
But hey, at least the generated capybara was a quick dopamine fix.
Signing off before the Nicolas Cage marathon begins.
Marco
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