He rubs his eyes, knowing it is going to be another wretched day. One of their principle clients was hit with an info bomb this morning. Feeds are being flooded with a vast dump of information about the client - mostly things they supposedly said and things they supposedly did - nearly all of which is definitely untrue.
Garbage made up by AI writers loosely leeched to all the online data about the client so that some of the articles and updates sound semi-plausible. They’re getting good these days, harder to tell apart from human-written content. So he sets his own AIs to unpicking the data, to parse out what is real and what isn’t. What is ‘true’ hardly matters at all - its all about projection, and right now, it isn’t looking so hot for the client.
Basic metrics tell him that the uproar has spread through most of the terminally online before he’s finished his first coffee of the day. It’ll get to gen pop by lunch. Most of the silent majority have the wherewithal to know that some of the more heinous accusations are pure fantasy.
Scouring through those is the part of the job that flenses his soul. Acts of depravity so vile that no human mind would dare to envision them - because no human mind has. An AI did. He has to scrub through a lot of it, to find easy ways to discredit it.
But the taint of suspicion will linger. Traditional media and public personas will feel hesitant to be seen in contact while this maelstrom of false information flies around the client. It’s his job to pull the client free of the storm as quickly as he can without tearing the client apart in the process.
And by the end of the day he will always be left wondering - why? Why would someone attack a client like this? The forbidden question, because it always leads to another, even more dangerous question - how much of it is true?
Paddy Dobson
30th August 2022