Each person I spoke to for this article told me they could talk about the right-wing project to erode trust in expertise, and the way AI has amplified this effort, for hours. In writing this article, I realized that I could endlessly tie much of our reporting on attacks on civil society and human knowledge to the force multiplier that is AI and the AI maximalist political and economic project. One need look no further than Grokipedia as one of the many recent reminders of this effort—a project by the world’s richest man and perhaps its most powerful right-wing political figure to replace a crowdsourced, meticulously edited fount of human knowledge with a robotic imitation built to further his political project.

Much of what we write about touches on this: The plan to replace government workers with AI, the general erosion of truth on social media, the rise of AI slop that “feels” true because it reinforces a particular political narrative but is not true, the fact that teachers feel like they are forced to allow their students to use AI. Justin, from librarypunk, said AI has given people “absolute impunity to ignore reality […] AI is a direct attack on the way we verify information: AI both creates fake sources and obscures its actual sources.”

That is the opposite of what librarians do, and teachers do, and scientists do, and experts do. But the political project to devalue the work these professionals do, and the incredible amount of money invested in pushing AI as a replacement for that human expertise, have worked in tandem to create a horrible situation for all of us.

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“Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another,” she added.