World Without Truth: How Business Must Confront the AI-Powered Disinformation Supply Chain

What happens to the world when AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from lived experience? When it’s deliberately molded into narratives targeted to fit individuals’ mental models and instantly delivered to personal devices across the globe? When fact-based reasoning gives way to outrage-driven impulses at scale? Sound familiar? We are hurtling toward a world without truth, where our growing reliance on digital information is leading us toward the total erosion of shared reality. Misinformation, disinformation and malinformation (MDM) represent more than a trillion dollar problem for the global economy: they threaten the foundations of social cohesion.

Many are aware of the issue but few have taken action to address it, except when they’re directly impacted by MDM. Almost none of us have yet prepared our companies to face this emerging reality more broadly. Distinct from physical security and cybersecurity, there is a need for all organizations to develop governance and processes and deploy tools and services that counter MDM systematically rather than episodically.

In this book, we expose the increasingly powerful and mature industrial disinformation supply chain, and outline steps needed for our companies and public sector organizations to counter the threats posed by a world without truth. Despite being somewhat new to many of us, the industrial disinformation supply chain is already evolving from simple disinformation to creating and poisoning AI models and creating deliberately biased chatbots. And this is by no means the end of the story.