The Generative AI Paradox: GenAI and the Erosion of Trust, the Corrosion of Information Verification, and the Demise of Truth
Authors: Emilio Ferrara
Published: 2026-01-01 10:58:51+00:00
AI Summary
Generative AI introduces the risk of 'synthetic realities'—coherent information environments where content, identity, and interaction are manufactured at scale. This qualitative shift, characterized by cost collapse and hyper-personalization, erodes shared epistemic ground and institutional verification practices. The paper proposes a taxonomy of harms, analyzes recent risk realizations, and outlines a layered mitigation stack focusing on provenance infrastructure and institutional redesign.
Abstract
Generative AI (GenAI) now produces text, images, audio, and video that can be perceptually convincing at scale and at negligible marginal cost. While public debate often frames the associated harms as deepfakes or incremental extensions of misinformation and fraud, this view misses a broader socio-technical shift: GenAI enables synthetic realities; coherent, interactive, and potentially personalized information environments in which content, identity, and social interaction are jointly manufactured and mutually reinforcing. We argue that the most consequential risk is not merely the production of isolated synthetic artifacts, but the progressive erosion of shared epistemic ground and institutional verification practices as synthetic content, synthetic identity, and synthetic interaction become easy to generate and hard to audit. This paper (i) formalizes synthetic reality as a layered stack (content, identity, interaction, institutions), (ii) expands a taxonomy of GenAI harms spanning personal, economic, informational, and socio-technical risks, (iii) articulates the qualitative shifts introduced by GenAI (cost collapse, throughput, customization, micro-segmentation, provenance gaps, and trust erosion), and (iv) synthesizes recent risk realizations (2023-2025) into a compact case bank illustrating how these mechanisms manifest in fraud, elections, harassment, documentation, and supply-chain compromise. We then propose a mitigation stack that treats provenance infrastructure, platform governance, institutional workflow redesign, and public resilience as complementary rather than substitutable, and outline a research agenda focused on measuring epistemic security. We conclude with the Generative AI Paradox: as synthetic media becomes ubiquitous, societies may rationally discount digital evidence altogether.