We have an odd sort of unfree press in the USA. People can, within broad limits, publish just about anything, but getting a wide audience? There are four major book publishers and a handful of mass media conglomerates, all with right-wing to far right ownership. What gets wide distribution is circumscribed, and much of what is published is vacuous. Even before “AI,” public discourse was full of blither. People are desperate for anything real to hang on to, and if they can’t find anything real, they’ll hang on to anything, even crazy things. The damaged US educational system doesn’t help, either; people need tools that will let them distinguish truth from falsehood, and the educational system doesn’t mostly give them those tools.
