a decade ago if you read an article like
"american scientists show promising Alzheimer's cure"
you'd get to the 2nd paragraph, find where it was published, go to pubmed , then sci-hub, read the paper and discover, near inevitably, that its a small in-vitro test (done w some chemical on some cells in a Petri dish/ test tube) or w/e
this of course wouldn't stop people from taking that 2nd hand misrepresentation by the illiterate science journalist and talking it up as a "breakthrough"
following through and finding actual information sources is *work* for the reader, theres an expectation of journalistic integrity (lol) so people just accumulate a ton of nonsense over their lives from half-remembered headlines and press releases and advertising-posing-as-journalism
the problem of generative text writing like chatgpt isn't such a new one, its just a [generate rigorous looking bullshit] button now
a decade ago you needed a person to fabricate the truth
""""truth"""" that is
it required an unscrupulous wholesale disregard for reality in favour of selling ad space, or a gobshite enamoured with their beat to the extent of shoveling nonsense - the effect is generally the same
now its just automated
the problem has been and is, as i see it; a passive readership trained to take everything on face value from Legitimate Sources of News and more structurally, a press facing diminishing income just desperate enough to cut further corners
i remember people going wild in one of my old social circles over "Proof plants are telepathic!" and it was one of those sites that exists (existed) to churn out semi-plausible sounding news to the unwise to get ad revenue
thats seemingly the trajectory of all news now
(the science paper at the root of all this was about plants using cross-species chemical signaling in response to being cut/eaten, iirc, a long understood phenomenon)
i worry we are heading to the point where everything just becomes the world weekly news and people eat it up because the gibbering nonsense-machine spewing this effluvia is clad in the flayed skin of "reputable" news orgs