The Cylon Problem: AI, Fakery, and Informational Power

AI is intensifying two interconnected crises in our information ecosystem.

The first is what Salomé Viljoen calls the "Cylon problem" — the growing indistinguishability between authentic human content and AI-generated material. This creates widespread epistemic instability: people can no longer reliably tell what is real, leading to generalized suspicion, the dismissal of genuine content as fake, and the proliferation of low-quality "slop." The result is a "zombie internet" where AI-generated content dominates engagement without genuine human connection.

The second crisis is the concentration of informational power. AI follows a familiar automation pattern: it scrapes human-generated knowledge (reporting, creative work, expertise), uses human labor (often involuntarily) to refine the outputs, and then replaces or devalues that labor. Journalists, artists, actors, and educators see their work encoded into systems they don't control and from which they don't benefit. This shifts power decisively from labor to capital.

Public sentiment strongly favors human-created content, yet market incentives push companies toward "humanwashing" — passing off AI output as human for cost and legitimacy reasons.

This Ledger Entry expands how readers think about AI's societal impact by introducing the "Cylon problem" of indistinguishability and showing how AI concentrates informational power by appropriating and replacing human knowledge work — requiring both demand-side disclosure rules and supply-side collective data rights to protect epistemic trust and creator autonomy.