May 14, 2026
The internet has never been authentic.
Astroturfing, fake reviews, engagement bait, manufactured corporate voices, carefully curated personas. None of this is new. The internet has always had incentives to manufacture attention and manipulate trust. AI slop isn't some wild paradigm shift.
What's changed is the speed and scale. Generative AI dramatically lowers the cost of producing convincing output. Text, images, resumes, marketing copy, software, entire online personas. All of it can now be generated faster than it can realistically be evaluated. I don't think the biggest consequence of this so far is that AI replaces people. The bigger shift is that it changes the economics of trust.
The easier it becomes to manufacture convincing output, the more valuable validated, trusted signals become.
Most people have seen the goofiest example of this by now: candidates trying to fool interviewers by poorly regurgitating answers from ChatGPT in response to technical questions.
But those examples aren't the real story.
The real problem is that people can now construct a convincing false narrative around their skills and work experience. Resumes, cover letters, portfolios, outreach messages. Entire professional identities polished and generated at scale with very little effort.
Then comes the next layer of the mess: companies responding with AI validation and filtering tools meant to detect AI-generated applications. An arms race forms almost immediately, and honest people get caught in the middle of it.
It's easy to find examples of genuinely qualified people left hanging in the wind for months, sometimes years, struggling to find work. People I've personally worked with. People I respect. People I know would be excellent hires.
I suspect one outcome is that in-person events become important again. Job fairs. Conferences. Meetups. Real conversations with real people.
It's much harder to misrepresent yourself in person.
The same dynamic is spreading across the broader internet. Authentic content is being swallowed, and soon it will be nearly impossible to tell at a glance what's real and what's generated fantasy.
Curation isn't new. People have always posted the highlight reel. But the highlight reel was still anchored to something that happened. What's emerging now is different: entire narratives manufactured from nothing. Not edited, not exaggerated. Constructed. And vetting that content takes effort most people don't have.
LinkedIn is where I find this most jarring.
In software, there's a concept called a "code smell." You review something and even if it technically works, you can feel something is off. We're developing the same instinct for online content now. Call it content smell. You can feel when someone's voice has slipped into the uncanny valley, or, more strangely, willingly leapt into it.
That last part is what gets me. People are using LLMs to represent their opinions, their tone, their personality, in service of building a reputation as a thought leader. The whole project is to look like you have a distinct mind worth following. The method is to outsource your distinct mind to a model. The contradiction doesn't seem to register.
There is some hope here. I like the digital detox trend emerging with a lot of Gen Z. We may have swung from oversharing being the problem to sharing nothing but constructed fantasy, but I don't think people will sit in that fantasy forever. Sitting across from each other, unfiltered, touching grass. That's where most of us are at our most authentic anyway.
The easier it becomes to manufacture convincing output, the more valuable vetted, trusted signals become. That applies to people, but it applies just as strongly to businesses and brands.
A recognizable brand has always been a trust shortcut. Consumers rarely evaluate every purchase from first principles. They're buying consistency, predictability, confidence that the product will match expectations. They're buying trust.
For founders, this is the part worth paying attention to. The companies that win in a flood of synthetic content, fake engagement, and AI-written marketing copy will be the ones with something the flood can't fake: a real reputation, a real customer relationship, a real track record. Brands built on cheap acquisition and SEO mass-production are about to find out how much of their moat was borrowed water.
Ironically, the more artificial the internet becomes, the more valuable authenticity, reputation, and real human trust become.