Knowledge flows at the speed of trust. What happens when we cannot trust the sources that inform our knowledge? How much information is now polluted with AI slop? Was that image we just saw manipulated or created by generative AI tools?
In this world of mass information manipulation, learning really is the work. That learning is becoming more dependent on trusted relationships with other people. As organizations large and small rely more on generative AI tools to produce media, we need to become story skeptics. As we continue to encounter more disorientation we have to rely on communities and networks of trust to make sense.
But communities can have their dark sides — they can strengthen bias, reinforce prejudice, and even make hate socially acceptable. Diverse knowledge networks can counteract the group-think that may emerge in communities. To make sense of our complex, chaotic, and fake-media-rich world, we need both networks and communities.
Finding and participating in communities needs to be coupled with a willingness to explore messier networks to understand different perspective. Real learning is not abstract. It can be painful. It requires engagement with others. Real learning is how we are going to somehow get through the messes we all face today — it’s called personal knowledge mastery.
