Discussion
This is a useful analogy from @pluralistic : COVID was an opportunistic infection. It killed disproportionately people suffering from other pathologies, and we, collectively, struggled to attribute the deaths of COVID patients to COVID itself rather than those other pathologies. Eventually there was a sort of agreement that excess mortality is a reasonable way to measure COVID's impact.
THREAD 1/n
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/20/epistemic-void/#expert-agencies
Similarly, AI is an opportunistic infection. It turbocharges deepfakes, industrialized scams, again attacking disproportionately vulnerable people. But we believe those scams because the institutions that are supposed to stand guard to the the truth are badly broken: "From tobacco safety to food safety to the climate emergency, it's obvious that the system of expert agencies that we rely on was terminally compromised by corporate power and regulatory capture".
2/n
(Maybe) two conclusions follow from this line of reasoning.
* Statistical: might "excess fraud" be used to estimate the impact of #AI on disinformation?
* Policy: it seems that we have no choice but to build a better world. Single-point measures are unlikely to be effective. When institutions are trustable and scammers and liars are marginalized, the attack surface of fraudsters shrinks dramatically.
For me, as usual "a better world" means "a radically rewired economy".
3/end
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