Truth, with a price tag
Grisha Gautam, XII C & Zoya Negi Manipulation of a ‘managed reality’ isn’t a new concept, just downsized to fit into your pocket. In 1977, Exxon senior scientist James Black conveyed the consequences of fossil fuel burning, but instead of taking action, the company doubled down. The doors on this pivotal truth were forced shut. Only 12% of the company’s public advertorials in The New York Times acknowledged anthropogenic climate change, while 81% expressed doubt. A lie convinces, but a doubt delays. And in a commercialised world, delay makes great proceeds.
Who gets you to trust? The builders of our worldview were once easily identifiable - an editor, a publisher, a newsroom. Quincy Institute revealed that over 36% of top US thinktanks barely released any information about their benefactors. Fair & Lovely’s rebranding to Glow & Lovely sparked initial backlash, but ultimately succeeded in improving brand perception in some quarters. The same dilemma follows us into online shopping. False reviews alone guide an estimated 227 billion USD in expenditure annually. Without credibility, integrity is outsourced to verification badges and polished aesthetics. The advertisement has simply learnt to say, "Okay, hear me out." Who makes it look real? For decades, ‘seeing’ was ‘believing’. Today, Generative-AI can create convincing faces, voices, and even scenes, making eyewitnesses harder to verify. The democratisation of creativity is great for a birthday invite or to recall the 80s, but not when someone can conjure convincing visual lies. About 99% of Fortune 500 companies use AI across enterprise functions. Even Puma uses Google’s Imagen 2 on Vertex AI to generate dynamic, high-quality product marketing assets. This cuts-down on production costs and time, but at the expense of the output stretching the truth. But who’s to blame? After all, AI-generated visuals achieve 50% higher CTR, bringing more interaction to the company. What looks real, may just be a reel altering your belief. Who funds the questions? Even before a claim reaches your feed, someone has decided which questions are worth funding. All profits go to the company, and all costs, including societal breakdowns, become ‘externalities’. Companies endow their own safety research while sitting on proprietary data that exposes how their algorithms impact mental well-being. According to BMJ, among 54 NPOs surveyed as funders, 48% had evidence of profit-for-profit funding. When the same interests that profit from a product help shape the research around it, the public deserves to know. The result is a cycle of control: the producer audits its own creation. Who tailors the ‘truth’? A photograph can be genuine, but misleading; a statistic can be accurate, but selective. India has seen this tension play out in 2024 when the Supreme Court addressed misleading medicinal advertisements by Patanjali, including claims of solutions to certain ailments. Corporations may alter evidence to reduce loss in terms of profit, shareholder value, legal standing, and of course, public reputation. Like fabric stitched to a desired impression, a half-tailored lie triumphs. Tomorrow morning, the coffee will still be waiting, with multiplied notifications and more versions of reality. When truth comes with a price tag, the pressing question is who stitched the convincing label on it. You can’t fact-check every video before breakfast, but you can pause before mistaking confidence for credibility and popularity for truth. So, are you ready to make peace with your caffeine again?
Your morning scroll was supposed to take five minutes. Instead, you have three new anxieties about your morrow decaf. Somewhere between notifications and a routine brew, fact-checking has become an assignment. One cup, four apparent candors, and a funding trail which dictates what reaches you first. In this age, truth isn’t free; it’s commodified.
Who gets you to doubt?
