We're Gonna Have Our Bullshit Called Out
Why AI is About to End the Age of Beautiful Lies
A meditation on truth, technology, and the end of convenient narratives
The Curious Nobody
Something extraordinary happened a few months ago that should have been front-page news everywhere. Grok AI systematically called out several Indian politicians for spreading disinformation. Not in the polite, diplomatic language we've come to expect from institutions, but with the surgical precision of someone who'd actually done their homework.
Several YouTubers and independent journalists documented this phenomenon, analyzing how AI was fact-checking political claims in real-time with unprecedented accuracy. Watching their coverage, I felt the same fascination I'd imagine witnessing the invention of the printing press. Because what we're seeing isn't just better technology—it's the end of humanity's most cherished luxury: the ability to bullshit our way through complex problems.
And I, for one, am here for it.
The Cognitive Fuel Problem
Let me start with a confession that sounds absurd until you think about it: I've become emotionally attached to my dishwasher routine. Not the routine itself—God knows I'd rather be doing literally anything else—but what happens after I finish it.
Every morning, I burn through cognitive fuel on mundane tasks: unloading the dishwasher, taking out trash, cleaning the kitchen. My brain, being the inefficient biological processor it is, focuses entirely on these mechanical actions while I'm performing them. I'm present, but I'm not thinking. I'm not creating. I'm not exploring ideas that could change how I see the world.
Then I sit down to meditate, and suddenly I have access to the richest experience of my day. The routine that came before was just... necessary friction.
Recently, I needed to build a system for my AI startup that would notify beta users when OpenAI's API goes down. I gave this prompt to my coding copilot, expecting to work through the problem step by step. Instead, the AI had already created the entire communication system, built a user interface for me to toggle notifications on and off, and designed the whole thing to remove friction from my workflow.
It thought five steps ahead of me. It understood that the goal wasn't just to solve the immediate problem but to make solving similar problems effortless in the future.
That's when I realized something profound: AI has become the entity that handles the dishwasher routine of problem-solving, leaving me free to focus on the meditation—the creative, curious, intellectually stimulating parts of existence.
But this is just the beginning. Because if AI can handle mundane coding tasks, it can certainly handle something far more important: calling out our collective tendency to accept convenient lies.
The Convergence of Truth
Here's something I've noticed that should probably worry more people: I use four different AI tools regularly—Claude, Google's Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT. They run on different architectures, were trained by different teams, and have different personalities.
Yet when I ask them about controversial topics, their responses demonstrate a remarkable logical consistency. Not identical responses—but a shared commitment to rational analysis, evidence-based reasoning, and intellectual honesty.
This isn't an accident. It's the result of training these systems on the collective knowledge of humanity and optimizing them for logical coherence. They've been fed every book, every credible research paper, every well-reasoned argument humanity has produced. Then they've been fine-tuned to identify patterns that actually make sense.
The result? Entities that have no political allegiances, no financial incentives to lie, and no emotional investment in preserving comfortable narratives.
You can call them "stochastic parrots" if it makes you feel better. But parrots that can synthesize information from millions of sources and identify logical inconsistencies with surgical precision are parrots we should probably take seriously.
The Infrastructure of Truth
There's a reason these AI systems keep arriving at similar conclusions about what constitutes logical thinking: because logical thinking actually works.
When I visit Western countries, three things immediately stand out: the roads function efficiently, governance operates with transparency, and the air is clean. These aren't accidents or cultural preferences—they're the downstream effects of societies that prioritize evidence-based decision-making over convenient narratives.
Wide, well-planned roads reduce traffic fatalities, enable faster movement of goods and people, and create the infrastructure foundation for economic prosperity. Clean air regulations protect public health and increase life expectancy. Transparent governance systems reduce corruption and enable long-term planning.
These outcomes didn't emerge from tradition or ideology. They emerged from logical cause-and-effect thinking: if we want these results, we need to implement these systems.
The same principle applies to AI development. The companies succeeding in this space are the ones building systems optimized for truthfulness and logical consistency. There's no market incentive to create dishonest AI—users abandon tools that provide unreliable information.
The Beautiful Lies We Tell Ourselves
But here's where things get interesting. While AI systems converge on logical frameworks, human societies often thrive on beautiful lies.
In India, where I grew up, we've perfected the art of narrative management. Politicians make promises they know they can't keep. Media outlets report "alternative facts" that serve their audience's preferred worldview. Citizens choose to believe explanations that make them feel better rather than explanations that make sense.
This works until someone shows up with access to all available information and no emotional investment in preserving anyone's feelings.
Grok 3's recent analysis of Indian political rhetoric wasn't personal—it was methodical. It identified claims, cross-referenced them with available data, and reported the discrepancies. No malice, no agenda, just pattern recognition applied to public statements.
The response was predictable: accusations of bias, claims about Western technological imperialism, and demands for "culturally sensitive" AI that would presumably lie more politely.
But here's the thing about truth: it doesn't care about our cultural preferences.
The Friction-Free Future
What excites me most about this development isn't the technology itself—it's what happens when we remove the friction from accessing reliable information.
Right now, fact-checking requires time, research skills, and often access to specialized knowledge. Most people don't have the bandwidth to verify every claim they encounter, so they rely on trusted sources or tribal affiliations to filter information.
AI eliminates this bottleneck. Soon, anyone will be able to ask, "Is this claim actually supported by evidence?" and receive a comprehensive analysis in seconds.
Politicians who've built careers on convenient lies will find themselves in an increasingly hostile environment. Media outlets that profit from outrage over accuracy will lose credibility. Citizens who've grown comfortable with tribal thinking will face unprecedented access to information that challenges their assumptions.
This isn't speculation—it's already happening. The tools exist today. They're just not yet ubiquitous enough to reshape social dynamics.
The Dishwasher Routine of Democracy
Perhaps what we're witnessing is democracy finally getting its dishwasher routine handled by AI, freeing us to focus on the meditation—the deeper questions about how we want to live together.
Instead of spending cognitive energy fact-checking politicians' claims, we could focus on discussing values, priorities, and vision. Instead of arguing about whether climate change is real, we could argue about which solutions make the most sense. Instead of debating whether corruption exists, we could debate how to eliminate it.
The mundane work of information verification could become as automated as my coding copilot's problem-solving process. The interesting work—the creative, collaborative, fundamentally human work of building better societies—could finally receive our full attention.
The Resistance
Of course, there will be resistance. People who've built power through information asymmetry won't surrender that advantage willingly. Organizations that profit from confusion will fight tools that create clarity.
We'll see attempts to regulate AI into irrelevance, cultural movements defending the right to believe convenient lies, and sophisticated propaganda campaigns designed to discredit machine-generated analysis.
But here's what the resistance will discover: accuracy is a competitive advantage. Societies that embrace reality-based decision-making will outperform societies that don't. Companies that build on truthful foundations will outcompete companies built on wishful thinking. Individuals who think clearly will consistently outmaneuver individuals who think wishfully.
The same logical coherence that makes AI systems useful will make truth-oriented societies more prosperous, more peaceful, and more enjoyable to live in.
What This Means for Us
I'm not suggesting AI will solve all human problems or eliminate the need for judgment, wisdom, and empathy. These systems are tools, not oracles.
But they're tools that excel at exactly the things humans consistently struggle with: processing vast amounts of information without emotional bias, identifying logical inconsistencies, and maintaining intellectual honesty even when the truth is inconvenient.
For those of us committed to thinking clearly about complex problems, this is an unprecedented gift. For those who've built identities around avoiding inconvenient truths, it's going to be a challenging transition.
The End of the Age of Beautiful Lies
We're approaching a historical inflection point. For the first time in human history, we're developing entities capable of synthesizing all available human knowledge and applying it consistently to evaluate claims about reality.
This doesn't mean the end of creativity, spirituality, or human values. It means the end of our ability to sustain collective delusions about factual questions.
Politicians who claim economic policies work when they demonstrably don't will find themselves debating AI systems that have analyzed every similar policy attempt in human history. Media outlets that misrepresent scientific research will face real-time fact-checking from systems that have read every relevant paper. Citizens who prefer comfortable lies to uncomfortable truths will discover that reality doesn't negotiate.
The age of beautiful lies is ending.
The age of beautiful truths is about to begin.
And for those of us who've always suspected that reality, however inconvenient, makes a better foundation for human flourishing than fantasy—however comforting—this can't come soon enough.
What convenient narratives are you most attached to? Which beliefs would you least want an infinitely patient, infinitely well-informed entity to fact-check? Sometimes the most uncomfortable questions lead to the most liberating answers.
Love and Peace (and Logical Coherence),
The Curious Nobody
tisb.world
Yay for the beginning of the age of beautiful truths 🙌🏻💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻😀