True-False Content and Artificial Intelligence

Faced with the multiplication of content automatically generated by artificial intelligence, publishers are alarmed. Yet this disruption could paradoxically strengthen our critical thinking, and thus our political consciousness.

The Attention Economy Facing Artificial Multiplication

Content publishers, particularly traditional press organizations, express growing concern about the phenomenon of automated siphoning of their productions. Artificial intelligence systems capture, transform and massively republish their content on third-party platforms, thus diverting traffic from search engines like Google. This capture of digital attention deprives original creators of advertising revenue that often constitutes their main source of funding.

This economic concern, while legitimate, obscures a more fundamental dimension: information is never a neutral product. All information conveys a worldview, ideological presuppositions, sometimes even a project of intellectual enrollment. If we accept this performative dimension of information, then the multiplication of a message, even altered, should theoretically delight its initial transmitter who sees their worldview propagate. In this context, information must no longer seek its legitimacy in economic profitability, but assume what it has always been: a tool of political influence.

The real problem arises when all reference to the original source disappears. Legally, we enter the domain of counterfeiting, which contravenes copyright legislation – although these vary considerably from country to country. This counterfeiting becomes particularly pernicious when automation by artificial intelligence makes one believe, through textual reworking, that the information emanates from a different source, conferring upon it a fictitious legitimacy and originality. Yet, the ideas are taken up and propagated.

The Historical Repetition of a Media Phenomenon

This phenomenon of duplication and appropriation of content is not new in the history of media. Since the invention of the printing press, publications of lesser scope have always drawn from the work of more established newspapers, recycling and adapting their information. The 19^th century “canards” already took news from major dailies, dramatizing or simplifying them. The current difference lies in the scale and velocity of the phenomenon.

Automation now makes it possible to generate thousands of variations of the same article in a few seconds. “Content farms” exploit this capability to flood the informational ecosystem with reformulated texts, what can be qualified as “informational pollution.” According to recent data, these automatically generated contents would already represent a significant part of the results displayed in personalized recommendation feeds, a phenomenon particularly visible on mobile platforms, widely used in France.

Nevertheless, this amplification raises questions for me: if the objective of information is to influence and transform the world, which all journalism does, consciously or not, then this massive dissemination can only serve the ideological interests of the original transmitters. The paradox lies in their simultaneous complaint regarding the loss of economic control over an influence they nevertheless see expanding.

The Illusion of Journalistic Objectivity

I believe it is time to definitively abandon the myth of independent and objective journalism. Journalists who would investigate social facts in a completely neutral manner to deliver a disinterested account to the public belong more to the Weberian ideal-type than to observable reality. Certainly, conscientious professionals conduct rigorous investigations, but their work always remains oriented by a reading grid of the world, whether they are aware of it or not (and unfortunately, they are too often unaware of it, I have often experienced this, it would be useful for them to have some sociological and ethnological training).

Pierre Bourdieu profoundly marked sociological reflection on journalism, denouncing the growing influence of media, and particularly television, on cultural, political and democratic life. According to him, journalism is no longer a simple relay of information, but an actor that shapes the perception of reality, often under the grip of commercial logics and audience ratings, at the expense of critical reflection and diversity of viewpoints. As he abundantly documented, the journalistic field is a space of power governed by its own rules, where supposed objectivity is often a mask placed on struggles for influence.

In the 20^th century, the same event treated by L’Humanité, Le Figaro or Le Monde took on radically different colorations. L’Humanité, explicitly defending the communist project, would moreover have had every interest in seeing its analyses propagate in all possible forms. This observation reveals a truth, which may seem strange and will undoubtedly be poorly received by journalists: objective information does not exist. As Gilles Deleuze aptly formulated: “Information is a control system.” (1987) Presenting information as objective actually constitutes an attempt to impose a single point of view, an intrinsically authoritarian project.

On the other hand, sharing one’s worldview while fully assuming the subjectivity of one’s gaze enriches democratic debate. The world is precisely constructed in this polyphony of perspectives and actions. There is no transcendent objectivity of good and evil, only social constructions and power relations; it is important to be aware of this.

The Hidden Structures of Informational Power

Contemporary press organs belong almost exclusively to private financial groups defending particular interests. This capitalistic concentration, documented by numerous media sociologists, determines editorial lines far more than newsrooms generally acknowledge. Journalists who work there have room for maneuver, but this finds its limits at the frontier of the editorial line, which itself serves the interests of the owners. Anyone who strays too far from the worldview favorable to shareholders is quickly invited to exercise their talents elsewhere.

Bourdieu analyzes the way television (and media in general) imposes its logic on other social fields, such as art, literature or politics. This domination translates into the search for sensationalism, standardization of information, and permanent competition for audience, which leads to a shortening of speaking time, simplification of debates and a rise in human interest stories. For Bourdieu, this logic weakens the democratic quality of information and contributes to the reproduction of social and cultural hierarchies.

This homogenization of thought is moreover already at work at the very heart of newsrooms that complain about algorithmic plagiarism. A considerable part of their production is merely a barely modified reprise of dispatches from Agence France-Presse (AFP). AFP perfectly illustrates this ambiguity. Presented as guarantor of informational objectivity and paragon of neutrality, AFP irrigates the entire French media landscape. Major dailies, pressed by the urgency of continuous news, massively take up its dispatches, often with cosmetic modifications. This homogenization of sources creates a standardization of thought that artificial intelligence only amplifies.

The reality is that AFP itself cannot claim any neutrality. Its director general is appointed by the highest instances of the State, more precisely by the executive power, and the agency maintains structural links with economic and political powers. And this in the current context where the French State largely functions as a facilitator of capitalist interests, often to the detriment of the citizens it should serve. In another domain, the police for example, we can see a very revealing semantic mutation: we no longer speak of “peacekeepers” but of “forces of order.” It is therefore no longer about organizing social concord but imposing an order from above. This semantic shift perfectly illustrates how language, even factual, imposes a vision: we no longer maintain peace, we impose order. AFP is, in its way, an informational force of order, participating in this apparatus for maintaining order, that is, obtaining obedience by force.

In the appendix of his work On Television (1996), entitled “The Grip of Journalism,” Bourdieu reveals the visible and invisible processes by which journalism, subject to market law, exercises a pernicious influence on all social domains: imposition of media rhythm, constraint of immediacy, predominant roles of TV “experts,” and framing power over public life. He relies on his major concepts, notably the notions of field, habitus and symbolic violence, to analyze the specificity of the journalistic field. He describes how journalistic habitus results from both structural constraints and shared training; journalists are not simple agents of the system, but neither are they totally free individuals in the exercise of their profession and in their way of thinking.

The Forced Emergence of Critical Consciousness

Faced with this proliferation of content duplicated, transformed and recycled by artificial intelligences, I paradoxically perceive an opportunity for us readers and viewers. This informational saturation could catalyze the development of a critical spirit that traditional media have never truly encouraged.

We are much more perceptive than journalists suppose. We develop an intuitive capacity to distinguish an automatically generated text from authentic human production. This intuition, that is, an eminently personal thought, constitutes the breeding ground for critical thinking. This recurring, varied, trivialized information becomes opportunities to question the very nature of information and its sources of legitimation.

The boredom provoked by the repetition of the same can push us toward other sources: personal accounts on social networks, alternative media of all political persuasions, singular voices that escape artificial intelligence algorithms, etc. These minority sources, precisely because they assume their subjectivity and partiality, allow for the construction of a truly informed point of view, not “objective,” which is a delusion, but consciously situated and critical.

Toward a Renewed Informational Ecology

The economic concerns of traditional publishers are understandable, and their mobilization to protect their economic model is legitimate, of course. However, it’s their problem, not ours. For us, citizen-readers, this technological disruption can function as a revealer: it exposes the partiality of majority information that claimed to be objective, while valuing minority, subjective and diversified sources.

It should be noted that Bourdieu’s analyses of the media, although influential, rely little on empirical surveys and constitute a minor but emblematic part of his research. Nevertheless, they have paved the way for a radical critique of contemporary media, inviting reflection on journalistic autonomy and resistance to economic and symbolic pressures. Bourdieu pleads for a reconquest of media autonomy in the face of commercial logic, to guarantee quality information and genuine democratic plurality.

Hannah Arendt indicated in her time that “freedom of opinion is a farce if information on facts is not guaranteed”. I would add today: this guarantee will never come from a single supposedly objective source. It will emerge from the confrontation of assumed subjectivities, from the multiplication of perspectives, from the critical consciousness we develop in the face of information.

Thus, the proliferation of content generated by artificial intelligence, far from constituting only a threat, could thus become the catalyst for a real transformation of our relationship to information. We would no longer be passive consumers of a prefabricated truth, but, losing interest in the majority of recurring messages, we could become active architects of an understanding of the world based on diversity of perspectives and the permanent exercise of methodical doubt. In this perspective, true-false content paradoxically becomes the revealer of the false-true information that has structured our public space until now.

Of course, one could object that my discourse gives pride of place to “conspiracy theories” and unverified information. But in reality, it is critical thinking that I defend. The historian David Colon, in his important work in my view Propaganda: Mass Manipulation in the Contemporary World (2019), demonstrates that propaganda has not disappeared with totalitarian regimes but has on the contrary modernized and strengthened in the digital era. He analyzes how it “aims to influence attitudes and behaviors, modifying the perception of reality through the manufacture of consent and the concealment of critical thinking.” This concealment of critical thinking is precisely what I rail against. Colon shows how mass persuasion techniques, perfected by social sciences and neurosciences, structure global public space through micro-targeted advertising, nudging and massive use of social networks. Faced with what he identifies as a “global information war” that accelerates the decomposition of democracies, the issue is not to fall into “conspiracy theories,” which are themselves often a form of propaganda, but to reactivate our critical capacity. The critical thinking I defend is not one that rejects all institutional information on principle, but one that, aware of the manipulation mechanisms described by Colon, questions the production conditions of all information, whether majority or minority, official or alternative. And I believe that the indigestible increase in standardized information can open doors for us, through sheer fed-up-ness, toward information of a more diversified nature, like what permaculture is to monoculture.