Last night, I watched a documentary called Endurance, about the search for the shipwreck of explorer Ernest Shackleton’s failed attempt to cross the Antarctic. It’s an incredible story about the spirit of humanity. But as I watched footage of the crew and audio of their voices from 1915, I thought: is this humanity at all? Were there even video cameras back then? How did they get audio of these people reading their own diaries? Wait, did I just get duped by artificial intelligence?

There are obvious problems with AI. Any real writer will use a lot of bad words if you bring it up, because even the simplest chat bots are based on stolen work. Some of my own books are on LibGen, the database that Meta pirated to train their AI, and yes, that pisses me the fuck off. I put years of work into those books, and Meta can’t even bother buying a single copy to steal it and chop it up and make billions of dollars off of it? Fuck you, Meta.

Watching Endurance revealed a less obvious problem with AI: it has eroded trust so much that, even watching a historical documentary, I have no idea if what I’m seeing is real or not. Even if it didn’t actually use AI, that cat’s out of the bag, so now I have to question everything I see. Am I actually learning anything, or am I only seeing a predictive algorithm’s best guess as to what history looked like? Or even worse, a machine’s idea of how humans would react to a machine’s idea of history?

Is AI implanting false memories that I think are real, like a psychologist from back when ethics weren’t a thing?

Technology-assisted deception has always been around—I’m sure it wasn’t long after photography was invented when someone thought “what if I used this incredible civilization-changing tool to mess with my friends?”

Even staying in the shipwreck realm, Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable was an unassuming documentary about the art found on a newly discovered wreck, except (spoiler alert) it was all fake and designed to promote an artist’s exhibition of the fake shipwreck art he created. But that’s different from AI trickery! That’s human deception, human storytelling, human artwork. Even in its lack of authenticity, it tells you something real, and connects you with a person at the other end of the chain from human hands to cameras to another human on a couch in front of a TV.

So I’m not a luddite, I swear. I just like people.

I like learning things that are true.

AI makes it impossible to know if I’m connecting with people or learning anything, even in the context of a documentary that is supposed to be telling a real human story.

It turns out that my untrusting gut was half right about Endurance. At the very end (why not the beginning??), it reveals that the camera footage was enhanced, but real. The narrated diaries were AI-generated voices, based on other recordings of the crew, who, being dead, surely didn’t give permission for AI to imitate them, making a guess as to the emotion in their voice as they described the worst days of their lives.

The spirit of humanity is under attack.