WITH AI, REALITY IS NOW A NEGOTIATION

by rankin

We used to live by a contract. Not written down, but understood. Work had value. If you created something, it was yours. If you spoke, you had a voice. Even when we didn't agree with each other, we did it by a set of values and rules that were seen as dependable, yes bendable, but we could lean on it pretty safely. That was the social contract. But we’ve all seen that everyone can lie now, get away with it, and even become world leaders. The contract is broken. Yet a lot of us are still pretending to play by the old rules, when the game has already shifted entirely. And the worst part? No one knows the new rules, not even the people who built this world. Look at what’s already here: deepfakes so convincing they collapse the idea of proof. Whole industries of malicious actors weaponising those fakes for profit, for politics, for chaos. Large language models trained on oceans of scraped content, spitting out answers with confidence but no truth. Other LLMs [Large Language Models] that have been created specifically to intergrate lies into the public conscience. None of these things are just tools; they’re accelerants. They don’t care about facts, only about fluency. They don’t care about meaning, only about keeping you scrolling. And we’re complicit. We scroll, we share, we prompt. We play along as if the old guarantees still apply. But the contract has been voided. Work no longer equals value: machines can replicate it in seconds.

Creation no longer equals ownership: the system remixes your work into something it calls 'new.' Speech no longer equals voice: the feed buries you under infinite noise. The platforms and search engines told us they were democratic. They told us they were free. What they really did was flatten us into performers, rewarded with dopamine scraps while the architects rewrote the rules in real time. The 'Like' button created hate. Validation became currency. And the rest of us got addicted to performing our own relevance while the architects of the system cashed in. AI doesn’t just continue that. It detonates it. Reality itself becomes negotiable, line by line, prompt by prompt, video by video. The photograph isn’t proof anymore, the voice isn’t evidence, the face isn’t identity. Everything is up for grabs. And here’s the kicker: you can’t opt out. Social media you could quit. AI is baked into search, medicine, finance, law, hiring. It’s baked into the scaffolding of the world. You’re in the game whether you want to play or not. So here we are: bewildered, complicit, scrolling through a new world where the contract is gone and the rules are undecided. The people who built it can’t explain it. The governments who should regulate it don’t understand it. The rest of us? We’re stuck negotiating reality with machines designed to lie beautifully. The question isn’t whether the old contract can be restored. It can’t. The question is whether we accept this new game without ever demanding to know its rules, or whether we make our own.