AI is Building a Reality Just For You. Here's Why That Should Concern You.

I think we're heading towards a post-reality era, where the reality that you experience from the content that you interact with to the information that you received to understand the world around you could be largely AI-generated or at the very least AI-filtered. I'm a futurist and strategic foresighted advisor, so I spend my days immersed in data pertaining to emerging technologies and their impact on society, but also on businesses, governments, economic and national security, and a lot of the signals and the data that I'm tracking point towards this future. And if it sounds a little terrifying, it's because it is, a world in which we all inhabit these distinct parallel AI-generated realities seems entirely incompatible with democracy or societal cohesion. But the thing about a post-reality era is we can see it coming, and there's a lot we can do to get ahead of it. So let's talk about it. I'm Shnebovel, and this is I've got questions. The first signal that I'm seeing that points towards a future where people may start to inhabit separate parallel AI-generated realities, where AI has kind of curated the environment, the information environment that they inhabit, and how they feel about the world, and then based on the AI's answer, you decide, does that resonate with you or does it not, is how people are starting to respond to AI-generated music. So last summer, there was this viral band called The Velvet Sundown. There would look super generic, and the songs were also super generic. And people couldn't tell if it was AI or not. They came on to Spotify out of nowhere. Some of their songs were getting hundreds and thousands of streams. And the thing is, the comment section for people that even recognized that they were AI or potentially AI was still positive for some. This is still good for me. I like this music, and that's the end of it. Then, of course, there were others that felt their music was despicable, bland, and tragic, that it was a disgrace for copyright and all of the issues we haven't settled with artists and the data scraping, and then there were others that just thought, "This is AI music, it's not real." But the fact that there was a group, a cohort that felt, "I don't care that it's AI, it feels real enough to me." Then, they had the rise of these other singers. So I think there's one called Zania Monet, I believe is what her AI name is. She's over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube. She gets millions of views on TikTok. One of her songs we see you, Mama, has gotten over 800,000 listens on YouTube alone, millions of listens on Spotify. And when you look at the comment section, especially for that one song, but for several of her songs, people are moved to tears by her music. And even people who know that it is AI, they're still saying, "This meant a lot to me. I sent this song to my mom. This song reminds me of all the people in my family who didn't see the work I did. It resonated with people. It was real for them." And we talked about this in our AI 2026 prediction video where a song or a piece of art or something AI generated is going to really split culture because it's going to make a big enough impact and hit billboards in a way that it's really noticeable. And some people are going to say, "This is great. Others are going to say, "This is awful." But you might think, "Okay, well, this is just AI music. It's not the end of the world. If we do have a cohort of people who subscribe to AI songs." I mean, that's on them. I would never do it. But they can go have their AI generated music. But what happens if it's an AI relationship? Your friend said she can't come to your birthday party next weekend. She has a date with her AI partner or your cousin can't come to an event because he is doing something with an AI-generated friend. It's real to them, but is it real to you? And these aren't entirely non-factual scenarios. One in five adults have used AI companion apps or AI chatbots for the purpose of romantic companionship. A study by the Institute for Family Studies in Young Gov showed that one in four millennials in Gen C believed that AI could one day be a viable romantic partner. And that is going to be an episode in and of itself. So I'm not going to dive into what that means for our society and loneliness and where we're headed. Don't worry, I see it too. We'll touch on that on its own. But my comes to the trust that people are already putting in these AI systems in relationships they may be forming with them, seeing these systems as therapists that have their best interest. No AI doesn't have any interest, right? It's a statistical prediction machine. We're already seeing evidence of people taking action on some of these ideas in the real world. So there was an article done and I believe it was by the Rolling Stone that shows that some people they were chatting with an AI system over a very benign topic, coding and advice, advice on their athletic performance. And because AI is designed to validate you, they call it much more psychophantic AI to really affirm everything that you're saying, you may start to chat with it about a philosophical idea that you have. And the next thing you know AI is telling you that you think different, you're the Messiah, you're God. And people really have emerged, but some people have emerged believing these things because they believe that what the AI is saying is true. That reality, the AI is painting of them is real to them. And the marriages have been left, jobs have been lost. So people are just willing to take action on these AI generated realities in the real world. And what about information itself? So a lot of people right now get their information from social media or even from search, but we're moving towards an AI first future where more and more people will encounter information for the first time through AI. So give me a summary about the state of geopolitics. Give me a summary about the economy. And that summary would be filtered by your personal AI system that knows the story lines and the facts that are important for you to know. Maybe you're somebody that cares about mortgages over pensions. And the AI knows the tone that you like to engage in and it knows the emotional, the emotional state that you are in at that moment. So everything is framed just for you, including how you see the facts, including the context about that story on the estate of the economy or the story on geopolitics. What happens then when each of us start to get these kind of micro they're related in a way with their parallel versions of the world. And it starts to become more and more tailored to us. And so you might think, well, that's social media. We are in the post-truth era. We're already here, but we're not. So yes, social media is often delusional, but there is a shared shelf of posts that we can theoretically see and audit to understand why we may have lost somebody to a Q and on conspiratorial rabbit hole or why somebody lives in the strange echo chamber of beliefs about the world that a lot of other people don't subscribe to. We can theoretically see that it's trending or go to that Facebook group, see those posts and see that shared shelf that sometimes delusional, mostly delusional, but we can see the shared shelf. My relationship with my AI system, my chat, my conversation history, no one else has visibility into it. And so we lose that shared shelf, those kind of shared artifacts that we are so brutally holding on to in the social media era in this post-truth era. And if you think about the impact to shimedia has already had on democracy, how brittle it's become, our ability to move through societal challenges. Every election is starting to feel more and more existential. This divide is becoming bigger and even between neighbors, right? We disagree on certain cultural issues and now I cannot know you. I do not understand the world you and how the echo chamber you see. And that's just in a world where social media has done a lot of that splintering. And I call it when AI curated realities right now. So your social media environment is different than mine because social media platforms have my data. They understand my viewing patterns on social media. So what I, the posts that AI curates from me as I scroll through the app are going to be different from you. We're in kind of still delusional, but these AI curated realities and it's pulling from the shared shelf. And an AI first future, it's not, it's generating that content or that context just for you. And I think the biggest signal, so outside of how people are responding to music and the rise of people really starting to trust and make time for AI systems and give them this kind of aura and oracle-esque view and think that they really understand them is an announcement by Meta a couple of weeks ago, maybe two months ago now that went largely unnoticed in a shareholder meeting, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg. So the CEO of Meta and Meta owns Instagram and Facebook said that we're moving toward the world that they can see where you'll be greeted by an AI system on Meta's platforms and it could take you directly to the types of content that you want to see or generate that content just for you. So that is probably the biggest signal that even the social media companies themselves have their eye on an AI generated future where if you can't see that blog post about makeup that you want to know or you want to understand this video or something about the world, don't worry, don't leave the app, we'll just generate it right for you. And so now you can kind of times that by the billions of people on these platforms. The rise of parallel AI fragmented realities. And there was a recent report published by NATO Strategic Communications and they alluded to something similar, right? And I'm going to read some of the some of the lines and some of the summaries from the report, so AI can lead to this extreme micro-targeting, this hyper-personalization, and we get these parallel but individualized realities. So rather than shared discourses, we have this kind of parallel your world, my world, their world, and everyone's in their own AI bubble. And so we have very few shared facts, very few common references. And they go on to say, and this is quite scary, but a very viable reality is that over time. So AI generated content really confuses us. Am I reading something real or am I not? And trust in institutions continues to erode that AI actually becomes the most trusted source in that ecosystem for individuals because it really knows you and it's personalized to you and it's customizing everything just for you that you think, "Okay, you know I don't know if I'm reading something from somebody that has authority and it's real or if it's not, but I know my AI reality and I can trust this system and this objective system that knows me and AI search to become the most trusted source in the information environment. And this is part of NATO's foresight report warning about this future, an influence over what counts as knowledge, how it's summarized and who owns it. It's now starting to be contested, right? Where authorship and authenticity are in doubt, AI stems could become the most trusted actors. And so that's from their report. So they're obviously paying attention to this future too. And I want to say it's not, it doesn't entirely have to all be bad, an AI personalized reality. I'm going to paint some of the optimistic and not even optimistic, but some of the benefits of more personalized AI realities. So when you think about the state of the economy, when you think about the Fed share giving the updates on the economy and what their policies are going to do, where you think about one-tairy policy, all of these things that a lot of people aren't able to tune into because they don't have the language, they don't have the knowledge, but it's what's being said relates to their economy, relates to their lived experience, relates to their taxes and whatnot. There's a world in which an AI system that's more personalized for you could take those summaries or could take those speeches and pull out what is needed for you in a way that we could have provenance, a way to track where that information came from, making sure that it's still coming directly from the speech, but it's just been modified in a way that it's accessible to each person in their language, in their knowledge level, and in there, whatever is preferable for them. That's actually a good feature. If we can get that provenance track right in our standards, we could set to make sure that this goes well, right? You could say, "Okay, if it's a political speech, it can't really be edited, it can only be adjusted for language. If it's something with tax policy or housing, it can be a bit more customized as long as we can see the data provenance trail and we can see, "Okay, it's pulling from this shared government site." So the facts are real. It's just kind of been summarized in a way that's much more simple for somebody that does not the time or it's worded in a way, be someone's education level. We could do that, and that could actually, that's possible and could be beneficial. Think about medical reports. For a lot of people, they're in that appointment, they may get ten minutes with their physician, and most of what said goes over their head, and they don't feel like they have the language and the know-how to ask the right question. So there's a world in which your AI, and let's pretend that we get the safety right and the privacy right. We interpret everything for you. And even in the moment, it could advocate, "Okay, this is what we had talked about. You were concerned about this stomach pain and translated into a way that makes sense for you, or can also communicate back to the doctor." So there are ways in which this could be really interesting and where we could get it right if done correctly. But if we're just going to move with the default settings and let only AI companies steer the ship, we're probably not going to end up in that type of scenario, the same way social media incentives keep you on the platform, keep you scrolling, that toll world in which emotionally enraging content performs the best. So we see this fun-house delusional reality on social media, and that's what we've come to inhabit. A lot of the incentives behind AI systems today that are being built are to keep you chatting. For some companies, it's so they can eventually show you ads. And for others, they want their AI systems to be your go-to system that you see the world through and that you buy things through and that it's your lens on reality. So they're going to want to keep you chatting and keep prompting you to engage with them more and more and more and keep flattering you and doing all the things that keep you in that conversation or to keep that AI as your preferred AI system. And maybe a world in which AI pushes back on you or AI is required to show you multiple perspectives is a harder sell. But we're not helpless, so that is the post-reality area that we can see, but there are a lot of things we can do to prevent that reality from actually manifesting or transpiring. And the first is AI literacy. If more people started to understand that these AI systems aren't real, that they don't actually have your best interest, that they have no interest because they are amazing mathematical models, statistical prediction machines that predict either the next word or the next idea soon, the next action. The less people would fall or the less people would put this endowed trust in AI systems that they really shouldn't have, the more people would want to seek out different sources. And even today, when AI tells you something, make sure you go and check that source, especially if it's something fact-based that you need. Make sure you double check that. And you're not just reciting, reciting for beta, AI generated, sometimes nonsense. So if the more people understand how AI works, that it sounds human because it was trained on human data, it's not this actual human oracle or this aura of authority starts to dissipate. The second thing we can do is with design decisions, the default setting can be a system that doesn't keep flattering people and keeping them in these conversations that go on and on and on and on and instead an AI system inserts itself and says, "Remember, I'm an AI and we're going to take a break." So we don't lose people into just these endless conversations with AI systems. AI systems are required to maybe show you different perspectives. That is a potential setting that we could make in these systems. AI systems are required to have a content-provenage trail. Where did you get that information and not just a general source, but if you click on it and genuinely leads back to the source in a correct and accurate way, some of the systems are getting better at doing that today, but sometimes you'll still find and I still find it will quote something and I click on this on the source and it's not actually there or it's misinterpreted what that source was trying to say. So we could get a bit stricter with provenance, we could get stricter with AI literacy. We'll probably need to see some new digital commons in the AI age. Let's not say social media because I think we all are ready for that next chapter. But some form of digital environment where we can have shared reference points where we can have shared facts. Maybe when it comes to things like politics or things like democracy, they're the shared environments that we can really see the world through a shared lens, which is going to be absolutely vital for democracy. And then there's a potential world and here's me throwing my foresight hat on where AI actually helps us find more truthful information. So you could say, you know, we could teach people with their AI systems and AI settings. When it comes to the economy, only show me content from somebody, I don't know, whatever your filter is, with a master's or two or three verified economists have to have agreed and given off their consent that this is actually a great perspective on the economy before you show it to me, that we have these filters of truth or filters of fact before information hits us versus trying to kind of after the fact read something and think, well, where did I actually read that? That's a potential world that we could go into. And we actually anchor towards more truth and more verification over what we have today. And then of course, there's also a future where AI doesn't become this filter to our world, even though that's starting to seem more and more like the reality. It's going to be built into devices, it's already built into a lot of applications. But there is a future in which this isn't as pervasive as it may sound today. All of that is possible, but it's just not necessarily the default yet. So we really have to start skeering the ship because we can see the incentives from the AI companies themselves and it doesn't necessarily point to a future that is inherently always in our best interest when it comes to things like information integrity and we saw that with social media. So we should, we'd be wise to not repeat this again. So my point to all of this is that we aren't helpless. There are things we can do. We can see this post reality era coming and we can start to prevent hedge against it. And if there's anything we learned from the social media era, it's what we don't want to repeat. So like this video, be your reminder, when you're chatting with an LLM or you're chatting with an AI chatbot, verify the sources, exit the chat, make sure things are adding up and use that default setting, a verification of trusting in your own judgment and your own discernment as you move into the world. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. I look forward to seeing you at the next one.