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The Lens
Democracy requires a shared factual reality. Citizens need not agree on values or priorities, but they must inhabit the same informational universe - the same basic set of facts about what is happening in the world. Without this, deliberation becomes impossible, compromise unimaginable, and self-governance a fiction.
AI is dissolving this shared reality at an unprecedented pace. Generative models can produce synthetic text, images, audio, and video that are indistinguishable from authentic content. Recommendation algorithms optimize for engagement, not truth. The information environment is becoming a hall of mirrors in which every citizen can inhabit a personalized reality that confirms their priors and demonizes their opponents.
This is not a problem of misinformation that can be solved with fact-checking. It is an epistemic crisis - a breakdown in the shared capacity to distinguish signal from noise, truth from fabrication, authentic from synthetic.
The False Remedies
”Media literacy will save us”
The standard response is education: teach people to think critically, to verify sources, to spot deepfakes. This places an impossible burden on individuals. When the volume of synthetic content exceeds human processing capacity, no amount of literacy can compensate. You cannot out-educate an industrial production system.
”Platform moderation is the answer”
Content moderation at scale has already proven inadequate for human-generated misinformation. AI-generated content is orders of magnitude more voluminous, more varied, and harder to detect. Moderation is playing defense against an offense that improves exponentially.
”Watermarking and provenance”
Technical solutions like content watermarking and provenance tracking are necessary but insufficient. They can be circumvented, they require universal adoption to be effective, and they do nothing to address the deeper problem: that the economics of the attention economy reward sensationalism regardless of authenticity.
What We Actually Need
National
Public investment in epistemic infrastructure - the institutions, technologies, and norms that sustain a shared factual reality. This includes publicly funded journalism, independent verification systems, and legal frameworks that hold platforms accountable for the epistemic environment they create. Not censorship, but a public commitment to the informational commons.
Global
International agreements on synthetic content standards, cross-border information integrity, and the regulation of recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement over truth. The epistemic commons is inherently global; no nation can protect it alone.