Sustainable Media Center Substack
We’ve spent the last decade arguing about misinformation. Platforms built moderation systems. Brands worried about adjacency. Policymakers debated guardrails. The assumption behind all this was simple: there is a shared reality, and the problem is that bad information is distorting it.
Now that assumption is breaking.
In a recent conversation with journalist Nicholas Thompson, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said something that should have landed as a much bigger deal than it did. Asked whether models could be trained on synthetic data, he didn’t hedge much: “I believe you could get there entirely on synthetic data.”
That’s not a technical footnote. That’s a shift in how reality enters the system.
If AI no longer requires grounding in human-created data, then it is no longer anchored in shared human experience. It is learning from its own outputs, from other models, from a recursive loop of generated content. At that point, we are not just distorting reality. We are beginning to manufacture it.
