The John Griff Column: Truth – or Lies?

That gentleman’s brand of heroism is hard to fake when a news camera is relaying the pictures as they happen. The images of Martin Bell standing – in his white suit – in front of a camera live to the watching world as the fall of missiles in Gulf War 2 were beamed over breakfast March 2003 stick in many minds. Many initially questioned what they were watching when the first terrorist-controlled airliner flew full speed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in 2001, followed shortly afterwards by an identical attack on the South Tower. And yet, in the case of American Airlines Flight 77 which was flown into the outer ring of the Pentagon on 9/11, there were those who said that that particular act didn’t actually happen, and that it was a fake story. How could that be? Why did they think that?

Spin forward to these emerging days of AI. It is indeed becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between what is truth and what is counterfeit. Whether it’s statements by people of influence – some of them at the very top of political, business, or even royal trees around the world – or the reporting of stories and acts through the prism of a media world – the onus is on us to exercise whether we accept what we’re consuming as being the truth – or something bogus. Are we as good as we should be at achieving this, or are we losing our touch?

A few days ago I took part in a round table conference about developing businesses planning to expand from their startup phases to that of scaling up. One of the business experts taking part – the Chief Executive of a high-profile business in the county - made a very down-to-earth statement. “Does what you’re planning to do pass ‘The Mum Test’ ? Would your mum tell you that you are right to do what you’re planning?” It was a sage observation because obviously, a mum’s innate sense of sense and sensibility is the pinnacle of reason. Never distrust it.

Some years ago, on my Sunday Morning show on Radio Northampton, I had a panel of members of the public who would scan the day’s papers and talk about stories which had caught their attention for whatever reason. One panellist was a student doing a course on story writing (not journalism though). Often he seemed to struggle. When I asked him why, he said it was because he didn’t trust the papers – instead, he took ‘his’ news from social media platforms instead. At the time I recall we had calls from listeners saying that we shouldn’t invite him on the air at all – I wonder now if the same would happen.

For all the emotion that it creates, the challenge remains for us to decide individually what we consider to be wheat or chaff. But if the acuity of our decision-making skills is going to get blunted by ever-developing Artificial Intelligence, at what point will we get taken in routinely? What will happen to politics, business, our bank accounts and our ability to wake up from a Matrix-like imitation of life and reality? Will constant confusion or apathy from what is propaganda cause the extinction of our species through a kind of warfare that uses not bombs and bullets, but cyphers, software and computerised weapons which leave people alive, but annihilates the survival mechanisms upon which we all rely? Has that war already begun? What have Putin’s spy trawlers really been up to in the Channel and North Sea recently?

It is perhaps in social media where false reporting (or the publishing of plain lies dressed up as the truth) is most likely to find its warmest reception. Why should it be so, and why should we rely on others to call it out when it happens? Has that apathy already set in? Don’t be taken in by what’s not truth – if it looks too good to be true then it probably is. Exercise the best computer that’s ever been created – your brain. Don’t allow your senses to be dumbed. By all means challenge things for what they purport to be – but before deciding one way of the other, give yourself a reality check.

And then ask yourself what your mum would say.