All That Glitters
On Truth in an Age Engineered to Bury It
That Feeling
I was watching Michael Jackson fully belting recording quality vocals, gracefully holding a performance-crashing audience member up on a flying platform a little too.. perfectly, when I realized something felt off. Is this even real?? With my many years of interest and experience in both AI and video production I’ve always had a pretty keen sense here, but suddenly I’m having that now all too common sense that I just can’t be sure of what I’m looking at.
I’ve been aware of all these new developments in AI tech as they’ve surfaced, absolutely fascinated by the implications of the new abilities fleshing out before our eyes for a good while now. At first they just do impressions of good work, and at just the right interval it’s still not close enough to human level output and everyone, including relevant professionals all agree it just isn’t there and never could/will be, at least, not for many, many more years. A chorus of experts confess that everyone is just freaking out oversimplifying and exaggerating what the latest tools are truly capable of.
That seems to be a reliable wave that comes just before it breaks through.
Believe it or not, we’ve seen it with coding just in the last couple of weeks. Extremely high level coders are finding themselves suddenly edged out of ever really coding by hand, rather than actively reporting that ultimately, using the AI was making more of a mess to clean up than it was actually saving time —until just this last few weeks. With the coupled release of GPT 5.3 Codex and Opus 4.6 marking a new stage in the history of AI assisted coding, that threshold seems to have been hit.
This happened simultaneously as the reality of having a full-time, actually helpful, self-improving AI assistant arrived out of nowhere with the whole open-source OpenClaw AI project that stormed the tech world just this month when a retired software engineer decided to take it into his own hands.
People are automating their entire businesses. Legitimately. All the inefficient, repetitive tasks, suddenly able to be gradually automated, having ideal systems built around the process just by sharing the grievance with their new digital ally who eventually strings together solutions that all feed into each other, reducing the previously continuous headache into it’s simplest most organized form with much of the labor utterly cut out of the process. These are people doing real work, not just selling half-truths advertising their half-baked AI How To course.
But in the moment with that video, I felt that distinctly familiar feeling I’ve had only so many times over the last few years of not actually being sure if what I’m watching is AI or not. I’m being moved.. not just by a potentially fake video, but fake character hammered into my image of someone otherwise real who I have memories, and feelings, and thoughts about. The thing is, I kind of remember hearing/seeing something like this has happened at one of Mike’s concerts many, many years ago.. but I also feel like I’d remember the particular scene even more than I am. Is this fake? Nobody is calling it out in the comments..
I didn’t have the time or reason to follow it any deeper, this was just a momentary focus break, I just had to leave it that way and move on. An uncomfortable question mark I didn’t ask for suddenly inserted into my consciousness.
The Edit You Almost Believed
The very next short was another Michael clip for some reason… but one I’d actually gotten wrong before. Michael being interviewed by Oprah and beatboxing one of his songs for her, but a comedically edited one where he ignores her and just keeps going while she tries to speak over him. Actually super funny… but I originally believed it a few years ago upon a quick view until I eventually realized it was an edit when it made rounds again a number of months later.
This being the third time I’ve seen it, now knowing better, I have to see the comments showing how most people… are just taking it for granted, reaching conclusions, and forming beliefs coming out of it as if it were something they were seeing right in front of them. Clearly real to them. This one is just well edited, not AI, but it still turned those stirring winds of fearful insight into a little whirlwind here.
Though it wasn’t until I scrolled to the very next video that I suddenly felt like I was previewing the infinitely confusing rabbit hole that is coming for us all.
Gold Painted Refuse
Instantly a man’s face, all too close to the camera, fills my screen, imposed over an article, making giant claims with 2 minutes of pretty clear evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s counterpart, is behind a historically influential Reddit account, while connecting it to the details of how the AIs have been so deeply trained on Reddit and conditioned to favor accounts with influence like hers.
Those privy to the game already know that Reddit has served as a chief astroturfing operation, endlessly seeding and validating regime-benefiting propaganda, carrying forward the weirdest turns in our culture long before they were acceptable or understandable at all to the general population. But hearing that Ghislaine herself was busy regulating this system touched on something pretty dark. This account specifically, much like Reddit as a cultural force, was quite outspoken about “overzealous child protection laws” and legalizing related illicit pictures and videos, presumably along with every other variety of edgy progressive opinion.
But at this point… even all this is just.. par for the course. The things you learn about our environment and society get so much darker than we can ever imagine fully taking in. The hardest part though is… How true even is this?
Who is this guy giving me this info? I’m not familiar with his work. Does he have a history of exaggerating? Falsifying things for hype? Who has… the time… in the world… to check? And check deeper and deeper. Well I sure as ldkfgj don’t but, FOR SCIENCE I felt the urge to at least check one minor layer deeper and deeper to at least be able to mention having seen the concept while having at least some feel as to the actual truth of it.
Check the comments; everyone just buying in. Well.. it was the same with the fake MJ video, so that holds no weight by itself. So.. I asked Claude AI, just to even have a thread on whether she’s known to be associated with Reddit, or generally see what it gives me.
The response from Claude read like a Snopes article, or mainstream news telling us that something is “extremely dangerous to our democracy”. Hollow.. making weirdly emotional claims much larger than the evidence actually supports, and ultimately citing particularly biased sources. I don’t even mind the conclusion being against my bias, but the way it is presented so authoritatively with so much weight with so little to offer.. it just feels all too familiar.
Then you remember… the whole point of this was that the AIs are trained by this particular camp.. rooted right into the source of what I am attempting to investigate.
The Dead Internet Presses Back
Still… that’s not enough to draw any conclusions or know what to come out the other side of this video with. So, with no will to pursue this any further, out of diligence I click on a few of the sources.
One single Vice news article cited THREE TIMES. Another known, unthinking propaganda outlet as of the last many, many years, addressing it as “the incoherent conspiracy”, giving me absolute flashbacks to watching CNN, as the first mainstream news station covering “the debunked conspiracy Pizzagate” for the first time after the whole tidal wave on the 3 month crowd-sourced investigation into DC’s finest’ favorite grungy kid’s pizza place, Comet Ping Pong had finally reached an unignorable fever pitch. Debunked?? By who? Debunk it for us! Please? Nothing. No details, just shame, guilt, browbeating. No information. No settling legitimate concerns, just holier-than-though disgust thickly slathered on anyone repulsive enough to have even heard the subject before.
The only other citation being twice to this article… An suspiciously outdated, poorly formated website with a dead main image..
Which more reeks of AI generated, or otherwise spammed nonsense than any real, legitimate, unbiased thought of an earnest soul investigating, attempting to spread truth. And if you haven’t heard of astroturfing, or the Dead Internet Theory where people go into details as to the absolute mind-numbing level of bot activity creating so much of what we take for granted as people’s opinion, creating full profiles, and character backgrounds, and histories to these fake accounts, and websites, and even Youtube channels pushing and bolstering narratives, that’s quite an uncomfortable rabbit hole to get into. The chilling part is that we’re not just talking about today with the recent years of AI explosion. Your internet has been half dead this whole time. Falsified information and opinions and characters wielding them. Often complete with entire backstories, and even websites seeming to validate their existence as legitimate people with busy lives.
So… it’s almost like we know less than when we started… How can one possibly get to the bottom of even just this particular claim without becoming an impromptu independent journalist yourself and working yourself into a PHD in these particular topics and characters being invoked here.
It’s just.. madness. It’s meant to cause us to feel like it’s impossible to know anything, and encourage you to use Occam’s Razor for the rest of your life deciding, “Oh well, no, this is too complicated, I’m too busy to find out and it’s probably nonsense anyway.” Especially given that you will sooner or later be faced with authoritative opinions referring to it as something that’s ridiculous, only supported by unhinged “science deniers”.
How do you hold up the light even after you’ve found it when the darkness presses so hard and encourages you to let it go?
The Labor of Knowing
Finding truth in a world full of infinite noise and false exits is totally different than the world of scarcity our parents and theirs grew up in where finding knowledge was like panning for gold amongst stones and sand.
Well now it’s not sand the gold is buried in, we’re now panning for gold in a sea of gold-painted refuse. All carefully crafted to look like the real thing.
It’s no longer a matter of seeing a transcendent golden glint of truth amongst the more earthly greens and browns surrounding. Suddenly you have to realllllly know what that rock looks like, and feels like, and how to test it, from tireless experience and pursuit.
As weak as it sounds, ultimately the truth must be felt. Yes, sift and validate the details when you get that hint, keep approximating with your left brain, but you just have to acknowledge that you will never know anything 100%. 98-99% will suffice. But for faith, you know nothing, and you will know nothing.
It seems Socrates was on to something.
After enough searching all you can really know is that you don’t. But you can’t let that stop you from the divine pursuit of ever approximating The Truth written between the lines.
It’s a labor of love. And the alternative is death, in so many more ways than one.
It’s just… right there… you’re so close. Can’t you feel it?
