From the Fog of Imminent War to the Fog of AI Fake News
It's getting really hard to tell the fake from the real, and two major AI founders say 2026 is the year AI goes full rogue.
First, let’s start with the fakery in big claims made against the president, as if we need false claims to go on top of all the outrageous stuff that he actually does on purpose to keep the press entertained like flipping off and cussing out a man who criticized his handling of the Epstain Files today. (So presidential.)
I declare fake on the following, but you decide:
Example of Major Fake AI News against President Trump:
You can watch a bit of the video to see if you can identify the indications it is a fake AI video before you read my critique, or you may disagree with me and believe it is real. Feel free to use the comments section below to add other tells you spot that may help readers spot an AI fake that they otherwise find compelling, or to tell me why you think it is real.
This one sounded like a major story, in which the Supreme Court becomes much more aggressive, and with my time away recently, I thought it might have happened without my hearing about it. Still, I had to spend time to see if it was something I wanted to publish because it didn’t pass the smell test. Truth is now difficult to discern as AI fakes become abundant, which makes it time-consuming for a one-man team to try to filter.
One of the first indicators of AI fakery, as with this audio track, is that the story sounds too big or unusual to be true. That should make any of us check it out further before putting any trust in it, even if (or especially if) it is something you are really inclined to believe.
Second, I noticed right off that this video repeats the same points over and over, and that is somewhat typical of many articles I come across that I believe are written by AI, as the AI monster seems to want to put in a lot of what we used to call “fluff” in writing classes just to bulk up an article and get more pay by the word or fool the professor into thinking we were doing something. (While I’m too long-winded to have needed to do that in college—as I tend to like to cover stuff as exhaustively as I have time for (or maybe just exhaustingly)—I doubt it worked for those who did, as I saw a number of pages with “FLUFF” scribed on top. AI is still (at least a fair amount of the time) a little bit at the high-school/early-college writing level.
Third, the video doesn’t say what the Supreme Court’s supposedly huge and threatening decision against Trump was over. It stays vague. Avoiding anything specific is a way of making it harder to use Google to see if other stories have come out on the subject—a good way of crosschecking. (It also works like the familiar trick of false prophets who work for big profits by keeping their predictions a little too vague to easily prove they were wrong.)
The video also doesn’t show Rachel Maddow talking but just uses her voice. That is not as much of an indicator because AI could fake her animated image, if it wanted to, and this clip could be from her radio show, though the graphic doesn’t match what I find when I look at her radio show. I listened to part of her radio show today, which was about the Supreme Court voting against Trump, but found nothing like this, but I didn’t have time to listen to all of it because I wanted to get a couple of big breaking news stories out as quickly as possible. I found no other recent show titles that looked like they would contain this clip.
Finally, it came from a practically unknown source on Youtube. Checking it out, no other stories appear on the internet about this subject, and no shows appear on The Rachel Maddow Show (the television show) that match up to the big claims in this video about the Supreme Court threatening Trump with imprisonment if he doesn’t abide by their order. (So, this is more like someone’s creation of Rachel Maddow’s erotic dream—a story she dreams of someday being able to tell.)
So, in the end, I came to the conclusion that it was fake AI audio, and did not run it in Daily Doom news headlines; but all of that wastes a lot of time. So, as a one-man team, I wonder how long it will be before I cannot filter the fake news from the real because it becomes ubiquitous. I even wonder how many times I might have failed to filter the fakery already, even though I try … just like I try to filter out any of the conspiracy theories that I find dubious while publishing those that seem reasonably plausible. It’s only going to get harder, and our world, therefor, far less real for all of us as AI develops. Two big AI developers even say in one of the stories below that 2026 is the year AI goes out of control and runs where it wants to, unstoppable, on its own because it is now self-developing.
Now, here is some real news (I think) that really matters.
Breaking News:
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are all having outages right now (Maybe just Verizon, according to the next story.)
Widespread Verizon Outage Prompts Emergency Alerts in Washington, New York City
In addition, see the much bigger breaking war stories that follow: (Presidential actions like this against a nation that has not attacked the US and is not threatening to, used to be unconstitutional back when congress was doing its job. The president’s war powers are meant to deal with emergencies that put the US at imminent risk, requiring a quick response, not with merely intervening in and attempting to solve the internal problems of other nations. There is even a story below about how the present administration is now fully arming AI this year to attack humans, not just by making military attacks more precise but by making attack decisions and implementing attacks. What could possibly go wrong with essentially arming AI with the entire US military to battle humans?)
(Thank you to everyone who expressed cares and prayers when I went to emergency at the hospital on Monday. My heart feels settled down now to a normal rhythm at a normal rate, though my blood pressure has shot way up, but maybe that is a rebound from the medicine given to rapidly take it down yesterday. I’ll keep an eye on it, and I do have a conservative plan in place to manage all of that with diet and supplements without immediately leaping to blood thinners, etc.—a plan that had been working nicely for over a year until I took a long expired Metformin pill and got a little less restrictive on my diet during the holidays.)
