Today, I received, by email, a great article by Woody Allen on antisemitism.
Except that it wasn’t written by Woody Allen, it was fake and was written by AI.
That got me thinking about how media and publishing work.
For a long time, we lived in a world of gatekeepers: a few network TV channels, a few trusted newspapers, and a few trusted publishing houses.
We’ve since had a few decades of the long tail: from cable news to the internet to social media to podcasts, everyone has become a content creator as the gatekeepers’ power has faded.
We’re now entering an era where anyone can create content that looks like it was created by someone else (a column by “Woody Allen,” a book by “Ann Patchett”), and our ability to distinguish between what’s real and fake will keep decreasing.
How are trust and provenance established in this new world? Will the pendulum swing back to a greater role for gatekeepers?
I’m not saying we’ll go back to four networks, or that self-published books will disappear (they’ve gone from about 100,000 a year in 2011 to more than 2.5 million in 2025).
Rather, I’m asking: if anyone can use AI to write a column that looks like it was written by anyone, isn’t the only way to tell who wrote that column to see where it was published?
