AI Just Destroyed the Internet?

A few weeks ago, one of my subscribers sent me a message that initially seemed like a pretty ordinary warning.Someone was impersonating me on YouTube.Apparently, scammers had created accounts using usernames and profile pictures that looked like mine. They were leaving comments on other people’s videos pretending to be me, offering investment advice and inviting people into WhatsApp and Telegram groups.Now, fortunately, some of the scams were hilariously obvious.Bad grammar. Weird phrasing. The sort of thing where you look at the comment and immediately think:“Yeah… Asian Dad Energy would never write this.”Except then I found some that were much more convincing.Much more disturbing.I found entire conversation threads where scammer bots were using phrases, words and mannerisms that I actually use.They weren’t simply copying and pasting some generic scam message.They were responding to people.They were following the conversation.They were gradually building trust and steering people toward private messaging groups.At that point, I started going down the rabbit hole.And what I found was considerably more unsettling than someone simply stealing my profile picture.Apparently, I Have a Digital Twin NowI discovered a TikTok account using an AI-generated picture of me.Apparently, AI-me is extremely happy, incredibly well dressed, and owns clothes that real me has never seen in my life.So that’s nice.My digital twin has better fashion sense than I do.The account was reposting clips from my videos along with content from other creators, apparently to generate advertising revenue.But then things got weird.I started finding AI-generated thumbnails and even entire videos featuring a person who looked nothing like me, but was sitting in a setting that looked remarkably similar to my home office.Someone had essentially taken my face, my content and even the visual environment around me and used AI to manufacture an entirely new version of me.And presumably, make money from it.This is where things get uncomfortable.Because there is something deeply unsettling about seeing an artificial version of yourself walking around the internet saying things you never said.It feels invasive.Like somebody took a piece of your identity, fed it into a machine and said:“Cool. Now make me some money.”And unfortunately, this isn’t just a problem for YouTubers.It’s a much bigger problem.Welcome to the Post-Truth InternetI think we’re rapidly approaching a point where AI-generated content becomes so convincing that the average person will no longer be able to reliably distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake online.And if that happens, the problem isn’t simply that we’ll have more scams.The bigger problem is trust.Imagine opening YouTube and having no idea whether the person speaking in a video actually exists.Imagine receiving a voice message from your mother and not knowing whether your mother actually sent it.Imagine reading a heartfelt post from someone you follow and having no idea whether they wrote it or an AI agent generated it.Imagine seeing a photograph of something happening in the world and having absolutely no way of knowing whether it actually happened.At some point, the question isn’t:“Is this fake?”The question becomes:“Can I trust anything?”And that’s where things get really interesting.Because the internet was built on an assumption of authenticity.We assumed that there was a real person behind an account.A real human wrote the comment.A real person recorded the video.A real photograph captured something that actually happened.AI is systematically destroying those assumptions.And there are three major reasons why.1. Digital Impersonation Has Become Ridiculously EasyGenerative AI has dramatically lowered the technical barrier required to impersonate another human being.Want to copy someone’s writing style?Give an LLM enough examples of their writing and it can identify their vocabulary, sentence structure, favorite expressions and recurring patterns.Want to clone their voice?There are services that can generate remarkably convincing synthetic voices from relatively small amounts of audio.Want to create a digital version of someone’s face?There are now countless AI services capable of generating realistic images and videos based on existing photographs and footage.In other words, your digital identity is increasingly becoming something that can be copied, modified and reproduced.And you don’t have