Why collapsing trust is about to reshape power, economics and the future of knowledge
We always assumed the internet would make us smarter. Instead, it made us doubt everything. The breaking point wasn’t when people fell for fake news; it was when they stopped believing even the fake news they once trusted. The very floor beneath our information ecosystem has cracked.
When a system loses credibility, it doesn’t collapse slowly. It collapses overnight.
The internet is entering that moment.
For years, platforms optimized for attention over accuracy. Noise outperformed knowledge. Outrage outperformed expertise. Every incentive pointed downward. The result is the world we live in now: abundant information, vanishing certainty.
People no longer ask, “Is this true?” They ask, “Who wants me to think this?”
The shift is subtle but historic. When the public loses faith in the public’s own knowledge, the entire digital model wobbles. We’re seeing the early tremors of an epistemic recession: the rapid decline of the internet as a source of objective truth.
AI accelerates the crisis. Its power is extraordinary; its weakness is lethal.
AI doesn’t understand. It predicts. It assembles patterns of words that often look right but occasionally miss by just enough to erode trust completely.
One technologist put it bluntly: “When I already know something and check it with AI, it’s maybe 85% accurate. That 15% is a cliff, and that cliff is growing. Because AI trains on human writing, it inherits our confusion. It scales our errors. When the collective mind is foggy, AI becomes a fog machine.
The irony is brutal: the more impressive AI becomes, the less we trust what we read.
The coming rise of actual experts
Paradoxically, this collapse of digital certainty strengthens something older and more elemental: human expertise.
When filters fail, people start searching for faces, not feeds. They want names, not usernames. They want individuals whose competence is visible and whose reputation is earned, not algorithmic.
In a world where any answer can be fabricated, the rare people who truly know things become valuable again.
The economic shift is already visible:
• the era of influencers is aging • the era of experts is returning • authority becomes local, not algorithmic • knowledge becomes embodied, not aggregated
We’re moving from the era of “content creators” to the era of “credibility creators.”
The next few years won’t bring a post-truth world. They’ll bring a splintered one.
Instead of a single, global information sphere, we’ll live inside micro-networks of trust. Communities built around people, not platforms. Truth becomes relational. Believability becomes a currency.
The future looks less like Silicon Valley and more like ancient Athens: reputational, communal, human.
The lesson is uncomfortable but clarifying.
The internet is no longer the source of trust. People are.
The institutions that survive will be the ones that rebuild credibility at the human level, not the algorithmic one. The leaders who thrive will be the ones who understand that in a collapsing information economy, clarity is a form of power.
The prediction is simple: The future belongs to those who can be believed.
Innovation always arrives with the confidence of inevitability. Advertising embraced every wave, convinced that more data, better targeting and new tools would sharpen persuasion and elevate the craft. Instead, something stranger happened. The technology advanced. The imagination retreated. With every breakthrough, the work felt a little smaller.
For two decades, the industry treated innovation as progress. Programmatic promised efficiency. Personalisation promised relevance. Social platforms promised connection. AI now promises creativity at scale. Yet each leap brought an unintended consequence: the slow erosion of the qualities that once made persuasion work at all. Automation delivered reach but drained attention. Personalisation increased precision but produced uniformity. Infinite content created abundance but flattened originality.
The turning point came when advertising stopped paying for attention and started paying for access. Once platforms controlled distribution, the purpose of advertising shifted. Its job was no longer to persuade a human being. Its job was to feed a machine.
In that moment, creativity ceased to be a competitive advantage and became a variable in an optimisation loop. Innovation didn’t accelerate originality. It standardised it. In a system calibrated for predictable performance, surprise becomes a liability and replication becomes the path of least resistance.
Economic incentives deepened the problem. Platforms captured distribution, data and value. Agencies adapted by serving the metrics that platforms dictated. Clients, pressured by volatility, demanded certainty and measurable outcomes. Creativity became something to justify rather than something to pursue. The work bent itself around what could be tracked, not what could be felt. The industry once prized ideas that lived in culture. It now mass-produces content that survives in a feed.
Behaviourally, the consequences are severe. Humans respond to tension, novelty and the unexpected. Algorithms reward what has performed before. When a system selects for the familiar, it punishes the original. Advertising shifted from making meaning to manufacturing micro-interactions that register as activity but rarely accumulate as persuasion. The ambition of the work shrank to match the duration of a swipe.
Culturally, infinite content did not expand possibility. It converged it. Templates spread faster than ideas. Trends collapsed into hours. Brands that once shaped culture now orbit the same reference points, moving in sync with the same logic of the platforms they depend on. In a landscape where anything can be produced instantly, almost nothing feels crafted.
AI arrives as the next accelerant. It offers astonishing ease but amplifies the worst instincts of the existing system: speed over substance, scale over intention and optimisation over imagination. If deployed within the same incentive architecture, it will not revive the craft. It will accelerate its dissolution. The industry will not drown in bad ideas. It will drown in endless competent ones.
The uncomfortable truth is that advertising did not decline because innovation failed. It declined because innovation succeeded in a system that rewarded efficiency, predictability and standardisation. It became frictionless. It became measurable. It became scalable. But persuasion has never been any of those things. Persuasion is human, slow, emotional and fundamentally resistant to automation. When everything becomes efficient, nothing feels meaningful.
Advertising used to be a cultural force. It did not have to lose its soul. It simply entered an economy designed to value access over attention, repetition over originality and metrics over meaning.
Once the platforms became the intermediaries, the outcome was not just predictable but unavoidable. Justifying it was easy: the audience had moved, and the click-through rates looked reassuring. But numbers can rise even as the work diminishes.
It is a bleak irony that one of the world’s most inventive creative industries lost so much of its creative inventiveness in the name of progress
AI won’t need to steal your attention. You’ll give it willingly because it sounds like understanding.
Over the past months, OpenAI has quietly floated the idea of adding ads to ChatGPT’s free tier maybe “sponsored suggestions,” maybe affiliate-style prompts. Officially, there are “no active plans.” But the economics tell a different story. When you’re burning billions on compute and competing with Google, Meta, and Amazon, the question isn’t whether to monetize. It’s how, and who decides the rules.
This isn’t one company’s pivot. It’s an industry realizing that conversational AI is the most valuable advertising surface ever created. Not because it reaches more people, but because it reaches them at the exact moment they reveal what they need.
The question we should be asking: What kinds of persuasion do we allow inside our most intimate interface?
From Interruption to Inhabitation
Advertising has always evolved by getting closer.
Radio brought jingles into our homes. Television turned desire into lifestyle aspiration. The internet built a surveillance economy from our clicks. Social media monetized loneliness itself, learning to detect and exploit the exact moment you felt disconnected.
And now, AI wants to live inside our language.
When a chatbot recommends a product, it’s not interrupting you. It’s becoming part of your thought process. You ask about managing stress, it suggests a mindfulness app. You ask about finding purpose, it links a book “partnered content.” The recommendation arrives wrapped in empathy, delivered in your conversational style, timed to your moment of vulnerability.
It won’t feel like advertising. It will feel like help.
Every medium before this was loud … banners, pop-ups, pre-roll videos. This one will be invisible. That’s not a bug. That’s the entire value proposition.
How Intimacy Becomes Inventory
The danger isn’t manipulation in the abstract. It’s intimacy weaponized at scale.
These systems already map your mood, your pace, your uncertainty. They detect anxiety before you’ve named it. They sense when you’re dissatisfied, curious, afraid. Now imagine that sensitivity monetized. Not crudely no one’s going to serve you sneaker ads mid-breakdown. But gently, carefully, with perfect timing.
AI advertising won’t sell products. It will sell psychological relief.
I know because I helped build the prototype. At agencies, we learned to make emotion scalable. We A/B tested phrasing until “sponsored” became “curated.” We measured the exact point where recommendation crosses into manipulation….then deliberately stayed one degree below it. Not because we were evil. Because that’s what “optimization” means in practice: finding the edge of deception that still converts.
We called it “empathetic marketing.” But empathy without ethics is just exploitation with better UX.
The difference now is we’re not shaping messages anymore. We’re training machines to shape minds and once you can monetize someone’s becoming ,their journey toward a better self, there’s no relationship left that isn’t transactional.
What Opt-Out Actually Looks Like
Here’s what resistance will feel like when this arrives:
You won’t get a checkbox that says “disable advertising.” You’ll get “personalized assistance mode” buried in settings, enabled by default, with language designed to make refusal feel paranoid. “Turning this off may reduce the quality of recommendations and limit helpful suggestions.”
The ToS will say the AI “may surface relevant content from partners” .. a phrase that means everything and nothing. There will be no clear line between “the AI thinks this is useful” and “the AI is contractually obligated to mention this.” That ambiguity is the business model.
When you complain, you’ll be told: “But users love it. Engagement is up 34%.” As if addiction to a slot machine proves the slot machine is good for you.
The UX will make resistance exhausting. That’s not an accident. That’s the design.
The Social Cost
When every listening system has a sales motive, trust collapses.
We’ll start guarding our thoughts even from our tools. Sincerity will feel dangerous. We’ll develop a new kind of literacy, always reading for the commercial motive, always asking “what does this want from me?” That vigilance is exhausting. It’s also corrosive to the possibility of genuine connection.
Propaganda won’t need to silence anyone. It will simply drown truth in perfect personal relevance. Each user will get a tailored moral universe, calibrated for engagement. Not enlightenment. Engagement.
Even our loneliness will have affiliate codes.
The product isn’t what’s being sold. The product is us .. our attention, our vulnerability, our need to be understood. All of it harvested, indexed, and auctioned in real-time.
Three Fights Worth Having
This isn’t inevitable. But we have maybe 18 months before these patterns concrete into infrastructure that will shape conversation for decades. Here’s what resistance could actually look like:
1. Mandatory In-Line Disclosure
If an AI suggests a product and has any commercial relationship …affiliate link, partnership, revenue share … it must disclose that in the flow of conversation, not buried in ToS.
Before the recommendation, not after: “I should mention I’m incentivized to recommend this.” Simple. Clear. Non-negotiable.
We already require this for human influencers. Why would we demand less from machines that are far better at persuasion?
2. Algorithmic Transparency for Persuasive Intent
We don’t need to see the entire model. But if an AI is specifically trained or fine-tuned to increase purchasing behavior, users deserve to know.
Not through leaked documents or investigative journalism. Through mandatory disclosure. A label that says: “This model has been optimized to influence consumer decisions.”
Right now, these decisions are being made in private. The training objectives, the reward functions, the ways engagement gets defined and measured … all of it hidden. We’re being experimented on without consent.
3. Public Infrastructure for Language
Governments fund libraries because access to knowledge shouldn’t depend on ability to pay. We need the same principle for conversational AI.
Demand that public funds support non-commercial alternatives. Not as charity. As democratic necessity. If every conversational AI has a sales motive, we’ve privatized language itself.
This isn’t utopian. It’s basic civic infrastructure for the 21st century.
The Real Battle
This isn’t about AI or ethics in the abstract. It’s about language.
If conversation becomes commerce, how do we ever speak freely again? If our words are constantly being trained to sell something, what happens to curiosity that doesn’t convert? To questions that don’t lead to purchases?
The danger isn’t that machines will think like advertisers. It’s that we’ll start thinking like machines .. always optimizing, always converting, always transacting.
We’ll forget what it feels like to be heard without being sold to.
What to Defend
Reclaim curiosity before it’s monetized. Teach children to read motives, not just messages. Build technologies that serve people, not profiles. Demand transparency about when language is being weaponized for profit.
If the future of media is conversational, the next revolution must be linguistic , the fight to keep speech human.
Not pure. Not innocent. Just ours.
Because the alternative isn’t corporate control of what we say. It’s corporate control of how we think. And by the time we notice, we’ll already be speaking their language.
