How to cope in a world where Everything is Fake (and Nobody Cares)

The Missing Cryptoqueen creator and AI expert Jamie Bartlett on creating a bot of himself – and why he thinks wrestling created our misinformation age.

As journalist Jamie Bartlett was working on a book about AI, he observed an internet full of fakery: "fake news, fake bots, fake cryptocurrencies, fake Amazon reviews, fake companies. Podcasters who will quite happily share false information."

Worse still, he was surprised at how little people cared about the amount of fake information online. He noticed a new attitude growing among internet users: "If it feels true to them, if it confirms the things they believe, they don't seem to mind if the information they receive is fabricated."

This led the creator of BBC podcasts The Missing Cryptoqueen and Believe in Magic to create a new series. In Everything is Fake (And Nobody Cares), he traces the growing influence of fakery on our lives, from the popularity of wrestling on TV in the late 1970s to our current climate of deepfakes and generative AI images.

The series is co-hosted by Bartlett and 'Jamie Bot-lett', an AI version of the journalist created by a large language model (LLM).

It demonstrated to him how easy these bots might be to fall for. "The voice was quite good. My partner could probably tell it wasn't me, but my mum probably couldn't tell."

Bartlett found being imitated by one a "weird" experience.

"There were moments where the bot was embarrassingly bad [at presenting], making mistakes and making stuff up. Other times it was writing things that were better than what I could write."

These were more than minor mistakes. It introduced one guest by accusing him of being part of a cheating scandal that never happened.

"[LLMs] sound as confident and as fluent when they're right or when they're generating a 10,000-word phony universe," he says.

He sees this as a huge problem for humans, who tend to believe people when they are confident about what they are saying.

For Bartlett, however, the rise in fake information began long before AI.

His show explores how wrestling, which became hugely popular in the UK in the late 1970s, uses the term 'kayfabe', meaning staged elements that viewers know are fake, but invest in as though they are real.

This was later followed by structured reality shows in the 2000s, which featured real people playing themselves in staged situations.

Then came the 2008 global financial crash and the 2009 MPs' expenses scandal, which Bartlett thinks created a huge rise of distrust in institutions.

"There was an increasingly pervasive idea that everyone in power's cheating, everyone's lying, so why should you believe anyone?

"It makes it easier for people who are criticised by [the professional media] to say it's all a load of fake news."

In terms of accuracy, Bartlett is critical of both traditional media - and the lack of accountability in the so-called 'alternative media' of podcasts and influencers.

Though Bartlett admits he has no solutions for how fake information pervades our lives, he does think the professional media has a role to play.

"Journalists have to understand we like reporting stories that fit our worldviews, and we have to report the stories that might make us a bit uncomfortable," adding that, in his view, the BBC should ensure they cover topics of interest to everyone in the UK even if they might be controversial to some.

Listen to Everything is Fake on BBC Sounds now.