Networks killed reality: AI will make it even more non-existent, warns writer

CARTAGENA, Colombia (EFE).— For Juan Gabriel Vásquez, “the notion of reality has exploded into the air and no longer exists,” as a result of the impact of social networks.

In a talk at the Hay Festival, the Colombian writer said that “social networks have turned reality into a non-existent notion” and that “artificial intelligence is going to turn it even more into a non-existent notion.”

The author of “The Noise of Things Falling” was one of the participants in the panel commemorating the 50 years of the Spanish newspaper “El País”, for which he is a columnist, and in that context he urged that “become aware of a value of journalism that is going to be increasingly necessary… as a place of resistance against this kind of explosion of common reality.”

“Journalism is a place from which we can exercise resistance, opposition or rebellion against those who want to manipulate us, against the tremendously perverse alliance that is one of the worst things that are happening to us and are going to happen to us.”

He was referring, he explained, to “the alliance between (Donald) Trump-style populists and the technology oligarchs, the (Elon) Musk or (Mark) Zuckerberg-style technology plutocrats.”

Along with Vásquez, Leila Guerriero and Leonardo Padura were on the panel.

Guerriero considered that the best way to do “good journalism now is to be like the good old journalism of always.”

He added that for “El País” it is very important “to support with great strength, with great resistance, journalists who work for months on in-depth, complex issues and that this later have a place in the newspaper.”

He advocated that the length of the texts not be limited and that quality be privileged, that “they be challenging texts that do not give the reader a moral at the end, but rather fill them with doubts, questions and that lead them to exercise the best way of being a citizen, which is to doubt absolutely everything.”

At a glance

No simplification

Leonardo Padura warned that “there are substantive works in which you cannot simplify reality because you have limited space” and added that one should not allow oneself to be “too influenced by everything that social networks are posting.”

truth and lies

“The truth is relative and lies are absolute,” stated the Cuban writer.

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