I’ve been thinking a lot about lying lately. It started after watching the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem (and maybe also because of the 2024 U.S. election). In the show, we encounter an alien race, the San-Ti, who cannot lie, it’s just not in their wiring, like George Washington. When these aliens discover that humans can and do lie, they’re horrified. To them, we’re a species of walking contradictions. Unpredictable, messy, and at worst, existentially dangerous. I won’t spoil it, but it left me thinking: What does it mean to live in a world where lying is so normal?
Now toss in the wild card of generative AI. We’re speeding towards a future where computers can instantly whip up ultra-realistic photos, audio, videos, even entire personas. Imagine scrolling through your feed and not knowing if that celebrity product endorsement is genuine or crafted by an algorithm. Or watching a news clip and questioning if it ever really happened. The very fabric of reality starts to feel... negotiable.
Pretty soon, it’ll be impossible to know what’s authentic without some serious fact-checking. In this looming haze of uncertainty, I wonder how our relationship with truth will evolve. Will we cling tighter to authenticity, or will we become indifferent, accepting that fiction and reality are just two sides of the same coin?
The San-Ti couldn’t handle our talent for deceit, but maybe that’s their problem. Humans are messy, and lying isn’t just a flaw, it’s a survival tool. We tell white lies to spare feelings, we exaggerate to inspire, and sometimes we lie to ourselves to get through the day. Is it always noble? No, but it’s deeply human.
Sam Harris’s aptly titled book Lying gives this example: you tell a friend you loved their terrible screenplay to spare their feelings. Harmless, right? But now they might chase a dream built on a lie, one that could last a lifetime. Harris argues that even the smallest fibs create unknowable knock on effects and over time compound to erode trust and integrity with others.
Harris also delves into the impact of big lies, He zeroes in on the U.S. government’s false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That lie didn’t just reshape political careers, it cost hundreds of thousands of lives, destabilized an entire region, and left a scar of mistrust that lingers decades later. This isn’t your harmless “your screenplay is great” fib, it’s a lie so massive it altered the course of history.
Tiny white lies and far-reaching massive lies alike, our inherent tendency to lie will be amplified by AI, flooding our world with so much misinformation that truth becomes a scarce commodity. In this overwhelming sea of fictitious noise, people might start craving authenticity like never before. Tired of not knowing what's real, society could shift toward valuing truth more intensely.
Imagine businesses start advertising that all their customer service reps are real humans, no AI, no scripts, just genuine interaction. Politicians begin livestreaming their entire day to prove they're not hiding anything, embracing radical transparency to earn public trust. Brands admit that their product is simply high fructose sugar water, and that’s ok because it sells and is delicious, and is true.
In a world saturated with AI-generated narratives, simple honesty becomes a selling point, a virtue that will stand out. Ironically the very technology that threatens to drown us in lies might drive us to value honesty more than ever before.
That may be overly optimistic, so at the very least in the short term, we will need to develop sharper tools, technological, social, and internal, to sift through the noise. Moreover, in a world where fiction and reality bleed into one another, maybe the challenge isn’t about enforcing honesty but learning how to live with ambiguity.
One of my favorite thinkers, the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, once said,
“The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.”
In the end, we might not define Truth by separating fact from fiction, but by the fictions we choose to believe.
