“trust is flickering”

Knowledge flows at the speed of trust, I wrote in 2022, further stating that when trust is lost, knowledge fails to flow. This happens in organizations. It also happens at a societal level. Networks of trust are what create value at all levels for human society. The onslaught of generative AI and large language models is destroying our trust in much of the information that informs our knowledge.

My last post on organizational knowledge was based on an article that had been written with the help of AI. It was only through my trusted human knowledge network that I found out. Not only did I lose trust in the author but I think I eroded the trust of my readers here. I will have to be more careful if I continue to blog here and I am wondering what the future of my writing will be.

Andrew Trickett wrote in what the enlightenment can teach us — “We don’t often think about trust until it’s gone — rather like electricity. The moment the lights flicker, we realise everything depended on it. And today, in knowledge management, communities of practice, and this strange new world of AI, trust is flickering badly in society and in our workplaces.”

When the network on which we share our knowledge cannot be trusted — or at least requires considerable effort to check every link and source — how can we have trusted conversations online? This is an existential question for the practice of personal knowledge mastery and is why I am halting my workshop series after the October 2026 cohort. I still do not have a plan for 2027 and beyond.

Sensemaking in the age of AI slop will be a challenge. We can still read books, after ensuring they were written by humans, and we can get together in trusted online spaces. But what will happen to larger social conversations? Now that technology has connected most of humanity, are the platform owners and their AI data centres going to control all of our conversations? Our only real hope is that we collectively push back by not using AI, opting for open platforms like Mastodon, and using human-controlled tools. So far, that does not look likely for the near future, given how many people are still on platforms like X and Meta and mindlessly letting generative AI do their thinking for them.

In the past, I would have embraced any seemingly revolutionary new technology. And yet, today, I avoid using AI as much as possible. I am wary of cognitive offloading, as tempting as it can be to turn over certain tasks to a machine so I don’t have to think so much. Thinking is the point. I don’t want to get into the habit of avoiding it purely for the sake of convenience — I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human by Wendy Liu

Image from Seeking Perpetual Beta (2014)