Regaining trust in the era of AI

Your grandmother trusted her doctor.

- GAUTAM MUKUNDA

Your mother trusted consumer reports. You trust the 4,7-star rating from 2,300 strangers.But if you've recently used the internet to look at reviews for a stroller, or even for help selecting a health insurance plan, you likely noticed that it’s not very helpful anymore. Real information has become buried by an avalanche of artificial intelligence-produced fakery.

Today’s internet is less authentic. And less human. If you rely on it for information about anything from polo shirts to politics, that's a big problem. The good news might just be that in an age when artificial intelligence (AI) can manufacture those strangers — and their enthusiasm — overnight, people may start trusting institutions and experts again.

Partly due to the influence of the internet, we've seen a rejection of institutional credibility and the value of expertise in favour of the distributed judgment of everyday users. Generative Al’s infinite stream of digitally produced nonsense is making that an increasingly bad bet. A Graphite study of 65,000 English-language web articles found that before ChatGPT, about 5 percent of those were primarily A-generated. By late 2024 that figure crossed 50 percent. In April 2025, Ahrefs found that 74 percent of newly created web pages contained Al-generated content.