We need to be more careful than ever to exercise discernment—to distinguish truth from error, right from wrong, and real from fake. This will require us to analyze the content we encounter, but it will also require us to consider the creator of the content we encounter…whether that creator is a living and moral being who is capable of telling right from wrong or an amoral algorithm that simply provides what it programmatically determines we wish to see.

Several years ago, I enjoyed reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, an account of 2008’s economic crisis. I enjoyed it enough that I was eager to read his new book, 1929, which describes Wall Street’s greatest crash and the way it led to the Great Depression. I found it was well worth the read and recommend it to anyone with an interest in history or economics.

1929 does not only describe history, but also sounds a sober warning about today, for “ultimately, the story of 1929 is not about rates or regulation, nor about the cleverness of short sellers or the failures of bankers. It is about something far more enduring: human nature.” Human nature likes to think the good times, such as we’ve been enjoying in the markets over the past couple of years, will last forever. And “in that collective fever, humanity will again and again lose its head.” We do, after all, read history so that we are not necessarily doomed to repeat it.

As much as I enjoyed reading the book, there was something in the experience of buying it that alarmed me. I went online to buy it on the day of its release and was fascinated to see that when I searched for “Andrew Ross Sorkin 1929,” there was a whole list of results, many of which bore a striking resemblance to the actual book. I was disturbed to realize that most of them were lookalikes meant to fool people into buying them. Not surprisingly, these lookalikes were written by AI and self-published, a process that can write a book, create a cover, and list it with the major booksellers in a matter of minutes. Since then, I have seen this happen with many other books, and especially those likely to sell briskly.

We often hear these days of “AI slop,” a term that’s used to refer to the massive amounts of poor-quality AI-created material that is churned out and unceremoniously dumped onto the internet. This was once primarily artistless artwork and authorless articles, but has now advanced to much bigger and more substantial forms of content. My Facebook feed is cluttered with movie clips that have been fabricated with Sora, my search results with confidently wrong answers that have been generated by Google, and my RSS feed with articles that have been written by ChatGPT. It’s the world we live in now, a world in which the work of machines is mimicking and displacing the work of human beings, sometimes for good but often for ill.

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