The Janky Time Machine’s temporal navigation system has been making concerning grinding noises—the manual calls it “chronological clutch slippage,” which sounds fake but probably isn’t—and deposited me in someone’s living room a handful of calendar pages from now. Awkward, but they weren’t home. Their TV was, though.
Channel 7 News is broadcasting live. Or at least, something is broadcasting under the Channel 7 logo1. There’s an anchor, there’s a chyron about mysterious lights, there’s B-roll that could be drones or lens flares or a guy with a flashlight—honestly hard to tell. But that’s fine, because in the corner of the screen, there’s a helpful little box asking viewers to decide if what they’re watching is real.
AM I BOT OR NOT? it asks, cheerfully. Like it’s a game show. Like truth is a collective guess we make together while scrolling through our phones.
The bars update in real-time: Two thousand people have voted so far, which means two thousand people are sitting at home, watching footage they have absolutely no way to verify, and clicking buttons to express their vibes about reality. The news isn’t telling you if it’s real. The news is asking you.
Here’s what gets me: this is so much cheaper than fact-checking. No investigation team, no source verification, no calling the FAA to ask about flight patterns. Just air whatever looks interesting, slap a voting widget on it, and let the audience do the epistemological heavy lifting. Engagement is through the roof. Legal liability is nonexistent—the fine print probably says something like “community ratings are for entertainment purposes only.”
And sure, the people voting think they’re participating in journalism. They’re helping. They’re part of the process. Democracy in action, right? Except none of them can verify anything either. They’re just clicking based on whether the pixels feel real. Whether the narrative seems plausible. Whether their gut tells them this is the kind of thing that would happen.
The anchor says “Vote now at am i bot or not dot blah blah” with the same enthusiasm people used to reserve for “film at eleven.” Like the vote is the story. Maybe it is.
The Janky Time Machine is leaking temporal coolant onto their carpet—which is definitely real, I can smell it—and I should probably get out of here before the homeowner returns and I have to explain why there’s a weird guy from the past standing in their living room questioning their television.
But I keep thinking about that “Maybe” bar at 52%. Nobody’s sure. Not the viewers, not the news station, probably not even the person who shot the footage. Everyone’s just… vibing toward consensus. Truth by committee, fact-checking by feeling.
Makes you wonder: when did “seeing is believing” become “seeing is voting”? Or did we just crowdsource our way there one hot-take engagement metric at a time?
Came across an article this morning that inspired today’s post: AI Videos Have Invaded Local News