Have You Been Duped by AI?

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Clarissa

October 22, 2026

Have you been duped by AI-generated videos or texts and thought they are real? Do you believe you can tell an AI fake from reality?

If you don’t realize that, yes, you have been duped many times every single day, then you need urgent help. The quality of AI output improves exponentially. If you spend time on social media without any awareness that a large percentage of your feed is AI-generated, you’re setting yourself up to live in a fake reality.

There’s hope for people who at least understand that this is happening and that they have already swallowed quite a lot of AI-generated content as a reflection of reality. The very special cookies who are convinced they can never be duped are the ones that cannot be helped. The very special cookiness is how they are lured into accepting fake reality. Whether fake reality tells them that they can change biological sex or informs them about the day’s news doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s fake, and they accepted it because it flatters their sense of specialness.

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5 responses to “Have You Been Duped by AI?”

random reader

October 22, 2026

There are people who say they can distinguish human vs AI generated video content, music compositions or writing, but I am skeptical. I think AI is probably at the level of a mediocre writer/composer and can probably do a better job at it than a beginner. I do not know what future will bring, but one thing is sure, AI is a very big disruption to everything we do. I had to completely rethink my teaching because of the AI, and it is ironically making me spend more (not less) time on my teaching.

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 22, 2026
  
  I watch a clip on Twitter of a politician saying something, and I have absolutely no idea whether it’s AI-generated or not. Happened twice already today that I thought a clip was real, and then dug deeper into it and realized it wasn’t. I’m at the office today with short breaks for scrolling, and within that very limited period of time, I got duped twice. That I know of.
  
  Also, in complete agreement on teaching, I have to redo all of my courses for the spring semester. I have no idea yet how I’m going to do that.
  
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  1. random reader
    
    October 22, 2026
    
    I teach a math-heavy science class, and AI excels at doing all my homeworks, that are by the way advanced. All students are using it to get answers and to have it solve problems for them. I am not bothered by them using the AI, the problem is they are not making sure they can do the work themselves. There are many ways they could use AI as a personal tutor – it could explain concepts to them in a different way, they could use it to troubleshoot/check over their solutions, but all of these approaches require them to spend time actually thinking and mastering the material. All that pesky learning has to be done by students themselves, there is no tool that will make them learn if they are not engaged. When I was a students, there were ways to shortcut (or I really should say undercut) your learning as well (you could copy solutions from a friend or a solution manual if you could find one), but they were not as accessible. Now, everyone has a tool at their fingertips that can solve the homework in less than a minute. I had to create a lot of in class assessments (short quizzes every class period) so I can be sure to grade the student, not the AI. It is a lot more work than the last time I taught the class, and I am losing some instruction time to all the assessments we do, but at least (some) students are learning and I can tell it is somewhat working by the way they started to ask better questions in class when I cover new material. The part that bothers me is that I do not think most instructors are adjusting. There is already grade inflation, if we are not careful, AI is just going to make grades completely meaningless.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      October 22, 2026
      
      It’s even worse than grade inflation. Serious, responsible students will be penalized by getting lower grades than the cheaters and will soon lose all motivation in a system that is set up to reward cheating. Professors, like everybody else, are in complete denial. They think they will know when student work is AI-generated. This form of self-delusion will cost us all dearly.
      
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Demotrash

October 22, 2026

I think I am pretty good at detecting AI content (at least if it’s on the mediocre end of things.) But that’s not the same thing as never being duped by it. Even something you might theoretically catch if you were looking out for it is likely to just wash over you if you have your guard down. Certainly, if something I thought was real and/or human made was revealed to be AI, I would accept that rather than doubling down like many people in the literary scene have been.

The Caine short story prize winner, The Blue Fighter, I probably wouldn’t have realized was written by AI, though I would have realized it’s bad. But if you look at the Pangram results, then compare the story to the author’s previous writing, it becomes clear that either the writer has suffered a steep mental decline or has switched to AI. But the African response to this accusation makes the French look good in comparison. There may have been many idiots defending Orélien, but at least it wasn’t seemingly every person in France.

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