“We’ve focused on a lot of the negatives,” came the question. “Are there any positives?”
It was a fair thing to ask. I had, after all, just spent a good while painting a bleak and rather dystopian picture of the modern internet, and the person across from me was understandably eager to find a chink of light in it. As the person who had done the painting, I was keen to find one too.
There was a long and uncomfortable pause.
“Gen AI,” I began, with all the confidence of a man who has no idea how his own sentence ends, “is a catalyst of change across healthcare.” And then I trailed off, because I could hear myself reaching, and quietly admitted intellectual defeat. It was, I am afraid, a lost cause.
I open with that small humiliation because it is the most honest moment in the whole film. The truth is that the negatives are easy to list and the positives are hard to find, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something.
So, the negatives. The film draws a distinction that sits at the heart of everything my team does. Misinformation is false information spread by accident. Disinformation is false information spread on purpose, to serve an agenda. One is a mistake. The other is a weapon. Generative AI did not invent the problem; it simply collapsed the cost, the time, and the skill once required to do real harm. A teenager with a laptop can now produce what used to take a state intelligence service.
For me, this began in 2019, defending a mobile network against the conspiracy that 5G masts cause cancer. Then the pandemic arrived, and the same masts were suddenly blamed for COVID. Behaviour changed, infrastructure was attacked, and the government had to step in. That was the moment it stopped being theoretical.
At Kekst CNC, we then spent two years getting our technology into the right place, because we could see what was coming for corporates. I will be honest: it was never merely a commercial exercise. The internet that first drew me into communications has become a hostile place, and real lives are being affected.
I think of the CEO we shielded from death threats on fringe networks, the employees set upon by an online mob for things they never did, and the search results, increasingly the AI-generated answers, we corrected before they nudged people toward genuinely dangerous decisions.
I had the good fortune to make this alongside the genuinely skilled Mikey Hoare, whose background in intelligence and cyber shaped both what we said and how we said it. A couple of behind-the-scenes photos below.
If you need help preparing or managing a disinformation issue, or just want to share notes, happy to jump on a call.