Digital Drift

Rotterdam, 2031

The city still smells of the sea and diesel, though these days the traffic has quieted, most things gliding silently now — cars, trams, even the drones that hum like invisible insects over the Maas. I sit at my desk, third floor of a modest apartment, sunlight falling through sheer curtains onto a half-written draft titled “Synthetic Truths: Journalism in the Age of Generative AI.”

I delete the title. Too sterile. Too late.

I’ve been writing about tech and IT for over a decade. Mostly Dutch-language pieces on emerging platforms, cybersecurity, and the ethical dilemmas of automation. I used to believe my job mattered — that explaining technology helped people make sense of a changing world. Now, I’m not so sure.

My parents, in their seventies, still live not far from the old harbor. We talk almost every day. They can still manage — online banking, video calls, even some AI-assisted medical apps — but I see it in their eyes. Fatigue. Confusion. A quiet fear they won’t say aloud.

“I just don’t know what’s real anymore,” my father admitted last week after watching a news clip — or what he thought was one — of a politician saying something unthinkable. It turned out to be AI-generated. A deepfake. The sixth time in a month.

They’re not alone. Nobody knows what’s real anymore.

What AI has brought is not just acceleration, but something worse: a dimensional shift. We used to walk through a world we understood — three dimensions, cause and effect. But now? Now, reality folds in on itself. Truth is no longer found — it’s manufactured. At scale. On demand.

It started slowly, like rot behind wallpaper. Algorithms that predicted what you wanted to see, then shaped what you believed. AI tools to “enhance” journalism — then to replace journalists. Deepfakes that started as pranks now destroy reputations and elections. Lies outpacing corrections by light years.

I tried to warn people. I wrote about it when GPTs were still novelties and not arms in ideological warfare. I interviewed ethicists who said it was just another tool — neutral, like fire. But they were wrong. This isn’t fire. Fire doesn’t pretend to be your best friend, your therapist, your god. Fire doesn’t rewrite the past with perfect audio and 4K visuals.

The worst part? It’s subtle. AI doesn’t arrive with a bang like a nuclear bomb. It seeps in like fog. It comforts you with convenience, then smothers you with doubt. You stop trusting the headlines. Then the photos. Then the voices. Then yourself.

I’ve seen young people — smart, idealistic — unravel. The endless scroll, the contradictions, the curated unreality… it hollows them out. Depression is the new normal. Conspiracy replaces community.

And justice? That’s cracking too. Courts that once relied on video or audio evidence now face an impossible task: is this real? Is this generated? Who can tell? An AI can forge an alibi as easily as it can fabricate a crime. Truth — legal truth — used to be anchored in documentation. Now it’s floating.

I sometimes imagine a teenager — bright, bored, isolated — with access to powerful models. No malice, just curiosity. And yet, with a few keystrokes, they could derail economies, impersonate leaders, trigger chaos. No nukes needed. Just code and compute.

Am I too pessimistic?

Maybe.

There are still beautiful things being made. Art, music, even acts of compassion — all aided by AI. Some days I imagine what it could be: a renaissance, if we had the wisdom. A civilization where machines free us for creativity, not confusion. But that’s a vision. A potential. Not a plan.

And to reach that potential? We’d need something we’re losing fast: trust. Shared reality. Wisdom before power.

We built a machine that thinks in four dimensions — and we, still stumbling in three, now live in its shadow.

So I write. I document. Not to fix anything — I won’t pretend I know how — but because someone must bear witness. If this is the slow unraveling, then at least let it be remembered that we saw it coming. That some of us said, “Be careful.”

I close the draft and title it simply: “The Fourth Dimension.”

And I let it go.

By: Théo Cavalin