Algorithms and AI are making it harder to know what’s real

This week’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will generate a flood of news coverage likely consumed the way we do so many things today: through a screen. Technological marvels like the smartphone have given us access to vast amounts of information; but they have also made it difficult to separate fact from fiction, truth from manipulation. 

We have a reality problem. Many of the technologies and platforms that we have embraced as improvements have also undermined key parts of civil society, and nowhere more clearly than in politics. The images, video clips and memes about the debate that we will see on social media — where more than half of Americans get at least some of their news, according to Pew Research Center — make us feel like we are participating in politics, but have they made us better citizens?

Our technologies encourage the embrace of new forms of mediated experiences that offer convenience, but do not necessarily improve our interactions as human beings. Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus. And we are changed.

We are beginning to see hints of how these new ways of experiencing the world — more mediated, more personalized, more immediate — have altered our shared reality.

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump this summer, conspiracy theories abounded, including preposterous  claims that the attempt on his life was a “false flag” operation to improve his chances of re-election. A recent Public Religion Research Institute survey found that support for QAnon-related conspiracy theories has increased since 2021, with one-quarter of Americans now agreeing that “a storm is coming that will sweep away elites in power” and 23%  of Americans believing that “violence may be necessary to save the country.” Twenty-five percent believe “the government, media, and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles.”

These stories demonstrate a profound confusion and mistrust about everyday experience. Having turned to online communities to understand how the “real” world works, an increasing number of people are eager to reshape that real world based on what they’ve learned in virtual realms — and not always for the better.

Conspiracy theorists are outliers, but the principle holds for much of our regular social media interactions that bleed into real world behavior. One family physician writes about the disconnect he sees in many of his patients who are “less sure of the distinction between virtual and actual,” particularly after immersion in digital worlds. “I hear more and more patients complain that they emerge from sessions online feeling tense, anxious, low mood, or with a pervasive feeling of unreality,” he notes. 

Personal technologies grant us the ability to spend most of our waking hours crafting and living in a “personal reality.” In the 20th century, historian Daniel Boorstin, in his book The Image, coined the term “pseudoevent” to describe the manufactured media landscape that was meant to appear authentic despite its being “not spontaneous but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it.” Today, many of us choose to live in a form of pseudo-reality governed by algorithmically enabled individual experiences. Much of what passes for authentic experience today is vicarious and virtual. And we have started to prefer the virtual to the real. 

There was no deliberate effort to incentivize this way of living, although many individuals and companies have profited from mediated experiences. It is one of the unintended consequences of the bargain we struck in embracing the Internet. Besides, the new online world is fun. But what began as a slow bleed of reality has now become a culture-wide destabilizing force. Reality has competition, from both augmented and alternative forms. 

Technological change of the sort we have experienced in the last 20 years has not ushered in either greater social stability or moral evolution. In fact, many digital inventions and platforms have been engineered to bring out the worst of human nature. 

We see this acutely in our politics. Serious policy positions matter less now that so many politicians behave like Instagram influencers. We sort ourselves into angry tribes, saying and doing things on social media platforms we would hesitate to do face-to-face. 

Our reality problem will only grow as AI tools become more sophisticated and individually targeted; imagine a “neutral” AI chatbot programmed to encourage you to vote a certain way, or a politician using real-time AI enhancements to appear more charismatic. 

We need to defend humans against the further encroachment of technology, not only in politics but throughout our lives. If we don’t, the technologies on which we rely will only further distort our ability to distinguish reality from unreality, the virtual from the real, and genuine experiences of human connection from manufactured instances of outrage.

Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This is an excerpt from her book, “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World” (W.W. Norton).