"After the president posted an AI-generated video of himself piloting a fighter plane and releasing a flood of excrement onto thousands of demonstrators below, I heard from several people who had read my new novel, The Emergency, which will be published next month. They pointed out the resemblance of the video to a scene, near the novel's end, in which human feces become a primitive weapon of civil war."
"The year 2021 marked a turning point in the history of facts: from poor health to near death. The insurrection of January 6 happened before our eyes and produced about three news cycles of almost universal horror before that consensus began to succumb to the assault of partisan revisions and elisions, lies, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories that dominate our media and pollute our minds."
A fictional scenario depicting feces as a weapon closely matched an AI-generated presidential video of a leader dropping feces from a plane onto demonstrators, creating an unsettling overlap between imagined and real political provocation. The convergence exposed the depths of taboo-breaking appetite in contemporary politics and the capacity for grotesque spectacle. Longstanding journalistic trust eroded after January 6, as initial consensus gave way to partisan revisions, lies, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories. The media landscape has become dominated by competing narratives that blur the boundary between fact and invention.
Read at The Atlantic
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