Epistemic collapse

Lucija Gregov talking about the upcoming risks of AI. One is them is called epistemic collapse.

‘Epistemic’ comes from a Greek word ‘episteme’, meaning ‘knowledge’. Let’s start with what’s happening to us, and what humans are already doing with this technology.

A study published in Nature in January 2026 showed participants deepfake videos of someone confessing to a crime. The researchers explicitly warned participants that the videos were AI-generated. But this didn’t matter. Even the people who believed the warning, who knew it was fake, were still influenced by what they saw.

Transparency didn’t work. The standard response to AI-generated misinformation is “just label it” or “tell people it’s synthetic.” This study showed that’s not enough. Knowing something is fake does not neutralise its effect on your judgement.

So, the danger isn’t that AI will deceive us in some dramatic, sci-fi way. The danger is that AI will make deception so cheap and so ubiquitous that we might stop trying to figure out what is true. Not because we are fooled, but because we are exhausted. When everything could be fake, the rational response starts to look like not trusting anything at all. It started a while ago with all of the fake information on social media, but with AI, this problem is now becoming much bigger and on a bigger scale. We are also dealing with feedback loops of training models on user data, which is often wrong, or on user data from the internet, which is often wrong as well. How do we know which information was ground truth? I imagine this as making photocopies many times, and each time the copy becomes more distorted and further away from the original. But now, after we made hundreds and thousands of copies, we have lost the original copy, so we don’t have any idea what the original looked like. That is epistemic collapse, and it is already happening.