As technology improves, fake content will become harder and harder to tell apart from real content. Manual content verification won’t be able to keep up with the volume, and automated filtering systems will fail. In my opinion, there is only one effective way to stop fake content, and this is to verify that everyone who posts content is in fact human.
The rise of bots could render many online communities simply uninhabitable. Large websites such as Facebook and reddit may have some hope of policing content, but smaller independent players likely won’t have the resources. We are moving towards a model where the internet is dominated by a few centralized content providers and their walled gardens, and generated content may unfortunately make it even harder for grassroots online communities to survive and grow.
Media manipulation is nothing new. Attempts to control public discourse and influence the masses predate the internet, TV, newspapers and the printing press. What’s about to change is that now, with machine learning, it will become possible to turn electricity into millions of voices relentlessly spreading your gospel to every corner of the internet.