It was my birthday yesterday, and I am 49 now. As my close friends know, I prefer my routine life. I am a bit stressed with non-routine days, and accordingly, I am not excited to celebrate my birthday at all. Still, it is good to be beloved, and I know that I have my people to grow old with. Last night, while hanging out with Sinem, Hakan, along with Ayhan (abi) Yetkin, Barış, and Şebnem stopped by and that was lovely enough. I am thankful to the tens of good friends who connected, and I am really grateful! There are some few but precious friends who still read here! I love you’all, Sean, Christian, İvo, Duygu and more.

During the day, I had a presentation at the RESAID training program.

In times of multiple overlapping crises around pandemics, climate change, migration, war, economic recession, political instability and international conflicts, the reproduction of misinformation creates chaos, damage to reliable information sources and threats to human security. However, actors and organizations that threaten the digital environment and the cybersecurity space continue to develop new methods and technologies to damage vulnerabilities. Therefore, cybersecurity and content in the digital space, the discovery and mitigation of misinformation and the production of accurate information becomes a collective responsibility and requires horizontal cooperation between individuals, organizations and governments. At a time when crises are on the rise and complex problems negatively surround states and citizens, efforts to combat information disorders are crucial. In this context, our Creating Societal Cognitive Resilience Against Information Disorders (RESAID) project seeks to raise awareness about information disorders and contribute to the resilience of individuals through activities at different levels. Our project is about developing and disseminating methods to combat information disorders in times of crises and uncertainties.

I cared about my presentation focused on how Gen AI transforms the social production of disinformation, and I tried to go beyond the usual suspects: deepfake creation and automation.

Here are some epistemological issues I pointed out (formatted by Claude AI):

10 Critical Dimensions of AI’s Impact on Information Ecosystems

1. Epistemic Ruptures

• AI hallucinations represent an epistemological break from traditional misinformation
• These are neither true nor false but detached from reality, emerging from statistical patterns
• Academic citation hallucinations and computational confabulation undermine traditional knowledge validation

2. Adversarial Manipulation

• Coordinated efforts to influence AI models represent a new layer of information warfare
• Includes strategic dataset manipulation and prompt engineering for ideological capture
• Target the infrastructure of knowledge production rather than just dissemination

3. Ontological Transformations

• Information exists in a liminal state between human and computational production
• Authority of knowledge claims increasingly depends on computational processes
• Traditional verification mechanisms are challenged by AI-mediated information environments

4. Temporal Dislocations

• AI compresses distinct epistemological phases into a singular generative moment
• Eliminates critical reflection periods in knowledge production
• Shifts from descriptive to predictive epistemology, transforming knowledge into probability calculations

5. Infrastructural Invisibility

• Knowledge claims emerge from computational “black boxes” inaccessible to human scrutiny
• Technical expertise becomes prerequisite for epistemic participation
• Design decisions by technical teams function as de facto epistemic policies

6. Recursive Epistemological Systems

• AI systems consume their own outputs, creating “auto-epistemic cycles”
• Algorithmic patterns replace empirical verification as determinants of knowledge persistence
• New forms of collective memory emerge blending human and algorithmic processes

7. Multimodal Truth Claims

• Synthetic sensory evidence challenges traditional verification methods
• Undermines evolved human trust in sensory information
• Creates new forms of “computational witnessing” where synthetic information achieves evidential status

8. Uneven Representational Geographies

• Systematic knowledge deficits regarding non-Western contexts and indigenous epistemologies
• Model hallucinations disproportionately affect the Global South and marginalized communities
• Reinforces existing informational power asymmetries in global knowledge infrastructures

9. Linguistic Hegemonies

• Factual reliability degrades across linguistic boundaries, especially between high and low-resource languages
• Cultural concepts without direct translation equivalents experience particular distortion
• Local epistemologies become systematically misrepresented through computational translation

10. Infrastructural Access Disparities

• Uneven distribution of technology creates differentiated capabilities for misinformation detection
• “Verification gaps” where capacity to identify synthetic content correlates inversely with exposure to misrepresentation
• Technical barriers to model access reproduce colonial knowledge patterns where marginalized populations become objects rather than agents