Which is the real image? The man with the cars or the girl? (Remember me asking a similar question back in 2022?)

Okay, too easy. The girl has an extra finger .

But which image hit you the hardest when you first looked at the pictures?

When I saw images online from the Valencia flash floods, my first thought was 'Fake'. Other people were suggesting the same thing on social media - already there's widespread mistrust of images. However, when I did some cross-cutting searches, it looked like the Valencia images were for real.

I was feeling particularly sceptical about truth on the web this week as my Google searches now provide an AI summary at the top of the page. Google launched these summaries in May in the US and rolled them out in NZ on October 29th. You can't get rid of the summary on the search page, although if you take an additional step and choose the toolbar option 'Web', you don't see the summary.

These AI summaries annoy me intensely. We know Large Language Models do not look up and interpret information, they predict the next most likely word. As a result, although LLM material may be accurate, it is sometimes highly inaccurate and there is no telling the difference – the LLM's have no internal check and balance for truth in their outputs.

When I want to verify search information, and that's most times I do a web search, I use a sweep of search hits. I know this is also a flawed method – search engines have their own, secret, ways of prioritising the order in which information appears and which websites appear at all. However, some comparison is better than nothing. I believe Google's AI overview will rapidly be the information of choice for most people searching, rather than any actual website. I'm already finding the Google summary hard to avoid. Try as I might, I flick my eyes across the overview while attempting not to. We will all quickly be lulled into thinking we have got a summary of information from the overview, when we have not.

The other driver of my scepticism about reality on the web this week was reading an Economist article about the role of influencers. I thought influencers are for the Millenials but, no, it turns out 60% of GenX (my generation) in the US are sometimes guided by social media influencers when making a purchase and even 35% of Boomers are influenced. So influencers have...influence. The Economist article focused on how influencing is becoming a niche game – it used to be there were a few big-time celebrity influencers who everybody wanted to be and everyone wanted endorsing their products. Now companies are looking for more targeted influencers, who have dedicated followings from a niche market. This means there are more influencers each making less money; only 4% of the approximately 50 million influencers (or 'creators' as they prefer to be called...creators of what?) globally make more than $100,000 a year.