The erosion of trust and what might follow

2026-05-27

Before AI arrived we already were in a position where online trust was something difficult to obtain.

Recently there's been a general trend where these are the symptoms:

• online commenters accusing each other of being LLMs
• legitimate medias being immediately dismissed as being AI
• AI content being circulated as if being the real thing

On top of this we're seeing the domain of information security being overwhelmed by the AI assisted discoveries of new vulnerabilities. And those being communicated are the one discovered by the good actors, it's easy to imagine at this stage that any state level organisation is using these new capabilities to their own advantage. Recently even critical bricks such as SSL libraries and operating system where being patched following this trend of newly discovered flaws.

How much can we trust the little padlock next to our URL anymore?

So both the content and the platforms themselves are being put in a position where, as a user and consumer, it becomes harder and harder to trust what we're seeing with our eyes.

What if these trends weren't temporary glitches? What if the rate of increase stayed positive?

Pushing this reasoning to its absolute extreme, then we'd be in a position where anything displaying pixels should not be trusted.

This would lead to a complete information collapse, forcing us to rebuild trust with our real-life community. And I can't see this happening painlessly.