We're entering the era of 'AI unless proven otherwise'

"On the way to work, you see a TikTok video of the president admitting to a crime. In the elevator, you hear your favorite band, but the song is completely unfamiliar. At your desk, you open an email from an executive in another department. It contains valid sales information and discusses a relevant legal issue, but the wording sounds oddly wooden. After lunch, the CEO sends all managers a link to a new app she had casually proposed just a few days earlier."

"Any or all of these things-the video, the song, the email, the CEO's app, the candidate-could have been generated by AI tools or agents. But our epistemic defaults, I'd argue, are still set to assume these things are human-created unless available information proves otherwise. We have not yet entered a "zero-trust" paradigm where content is "generated unless proven authentic." Instead, we find ourselves in an anxious middle ground."

"Deepfakes were just the beginning. AI-generated video designed to mislead or incite was, not so long ago, seen as a novelty. Now it's common in everything from revenge porn to politics. AI-generated music has gone mainstream. Last year, a fully generated country song called "Walk My Walk" by Breaking Rust reached No. 1 on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart in the U.S. An AI-generated TV ad, made with Google's Veo 3, Gemini, and ChatGPT, ran during Game 3 of the NBA Finals last year."

AI-generated media and communications are increasingly indistinguishable from human-produced content, appearing across video, music, advertising, emails, internal proposals, and remote interviews. People still default to assuming human authorship unless clear evidence indicates otherwise, so a "zero-trust" paradigm treating content as generated unless authenticated has not fully arrived. Deepfakes and synthetic music have become commonplace, with fully generated songs and AI-created ads reaching mainstream audiences. The workplace is embracing AI tools broadly, producing content that can be accurate but stylistically unnatural. Rising prevalence of synthetic content raises pervasive epistemic uncertainty and creates practical challenges for verification, trust, and governance.

Read at Fast Company