Today you will be buffeted by a blizzard of lies. Just like every other day.
Imagine, get this, a day where everyone is lying to you on the internet. You log into a social media site only to find it awash with accounts carrying out engagement-baiting scams. Maybe you click on a story thinking it’s real, only to find it’s fake news dressed up to appear reputable. You see an appealing product, only to realise it’s the invention of a marketer or AI.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because every day is April Fools’ on the world wide web. Though some companies will try to reanimate its corpse this morning, the day is quickly joining the list of things murdered by Tim Berners-Lee. What used to be an oasis of tomfoolery in a desert of generally reliable information is now just another bucket of lies being dumped into a sea of lies.
Right now, roughly 97% of the content being put out on the Iran war is either AI generated, deliberately misleading, or both. Fake videos of missile strikes in places like Bahrain and Tel Aviv regularly go viral on X. Just about every US warship and military base in the Middle East has been destroyed twice over if you go by robot-generated explosions in your “for you” feed.
The same was true, to a lesser extent, during Israel’s attack on Gaza, when AI was used to generate a hostage video and video game footage was used to fool people into thinking the US was sending tanks to assist the IDF and Hamas was using missiles to blow up Israeli tanks.
The entire online world is increasingly one big prank being pulled on us by the bot farms putting out state propaganda. It’s got to the point that it’s noteworthy when the videos and photos coming out of conflict zones are real. “Israeli strike next to British journalist not AI-generated,” read a recent BBC headline, in a troubling twist on the “man bites dog” rule of newsworthiness.
The situation is compounded by the fact that many of the tools regularly used to fact-check the bullshit are themselves bullshit generators. The Guardian’s Tess McClure recently published an article on her battle to prove the veracity of a viral photo of the graves of dozens of Iranian schoolchildren. The photo is genuine. Despite that, a host of AI tools confidently assured her it was AI generated, often providing fake news reports or irrelevant data to verify their assertions.
The internet is becoming an ouroboros of misinformation, filled with inaccurate AIs training themselves on inaccurate AIs to produce more inaccurate AI. That’s to say nothing of the daily wave of slop being sandblasted into every hole and crevice of our largest social media sites. Every day a horde of epistemologically underprepared boomers dutifully log into Facebook to slurp up a tsunami of fake news intended to make them incandescently mad. The rest of us get either heartwarming AI art or dropshipping scams designed to part us from our butter money.
All of which is to say that if McDonald’s tries to convince me it’s selling a pickle pie today I will find a pickle and use it to whack Grimace on his stupid purple head. If the Greater Wellington Regional Council puts out a cutesy press release saying moa are back on the Miramar Peninsula, I will personally barbecue the first flightless bird I come across. The world is already sneaky, wicked, tricksy and false and the last thing we need is another lie, no matter how small.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to pull off a good April Fools’ joke. One of this nation’s more tolerable ones came on April 1, 2015, when BMW Newmarket paid for a front page ad in the New Zealand Herald advertising an “April Fools’ Day” special. It promised a brand new BMW to the first person who showed up to its dealership with the ad in hand to trade in their old car.
It was designed to look like a hoax. But Tianna Marsh took a chance. She drove her 15-year-old station wagon into the showroom and was promptly furnished with a new luxury car. That’s the kind of stunt we should be repeating today. In an age where every one of us is subjected to dozens of lies every hour of every day, the best prank you can pull is to tell people the truth.
