{
  "id": 9599457,
  "title": "AI Arrived at the Worst Possible Moment",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/24/ai-arrived-at-the-worst-possible-moment",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-24T17:49:08.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Time",
    "slug": "time",
    "url": "https://time.com/article/2026/09/24/ai-arrived-at-the-worst-possible-moment/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) arrives at a time when trust in institutions, shared truth, and information integrity have all been severely compromised. A decade ago, the term \"post-truth\" described a world where facts were less influential than emotions and personal beliefs in shaping public opinion. However, we now find ourselves in a deeper \"post-trust era,\" where the very mechanisms that establish trust have broken down.\n\nOver the past two decades, our information ecosystem has undergone significant changes. Truth was once curated by editors, printed by presses, and distributed through a few recognizable intermediaries. Now, anyone can publish, amplify, distort, or fabricate information. Data has exploded, social media has fragmented audiences, and algorithms prioritize clicks, engagement, and sensationalism over accuracy. Trust in the federal government has plummeted from over 70% in the 1950s to under 20% today, while confidence in mass media has dropped below one-third of Americans expressing any level of trust.\n\nShared procedures for determining what is real have eroded, leading to a loss of trust in institutions such as religious organizations, financial systems, healthcare organizations, and science itself. AI-generated images, voices, and videos have become so convincing that the question is no longer whether something is fake, but whether we can trust anything we see.\n\nRecent research indicates that exposing people to opposing political views on social media can increase polarization rather than reduce it, while false news spreads faster and more widely than trustworthy news online. Neuroimaging studies show that encountering information that challenges our political beliefs activates different cognitive channels compared to confirming information. AI arrives in a world where information is abundant, trust is scarce, consensus reality has fragmented, and shared truth mechanisms have broken down.",
  "summary": "“We are building the most sophisticated cognitive technology in human history atop the most fractured trust landscape in modern memory,” writes. Tiffany Xingyu Wang.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}