Are you there Grok? It's me, Margaret - by Jerusalem Demsas

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Are you there Grok? It's me, Margaret<br>AI as a centralizing technology

Jerusalem Demsas<br>May 06, 2026

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On the left compositors are at work setting up text using letters from a ‘case’ in front of them. In the centre background type is being inked ready to be printed on to paper in a flatbed screwjack press at centre right. Paper is hung up to allow ink to dry before being stacked in a pile by a boy at centre front. A master printer in a fur-lined gown supervises the enterprise. (Antwerp, c1600). (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)<br>Grok, is this true?<br>This question is asked thousands of times a day on Twitter as users fact-check, question, and prod various claims made on the social media platform by asking an AI bot to confirm or reject what another user is saying.<br>Yesterday, one user used it to check whether HVAC companies really “mark up refrigerant somewhere between 1000%-2000% of their cost” (true); whether Keir Starmer and Bill Gates were trying to eliminate livestock by 2030 (false); and to check the veracity of a sports reporter’s tweet about an NBA player’s postgame comments (also true).<br>The fear of losing shared facts has loomed large in the age of AI. In 2024, after a scandal over Kate Middleton allegedly photoshopping a picture of her family, The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote that “for years, researchers and journalists have warned that deepfakes and generative-AI tools may destroy any remaining shreds of shared reality.”<br>According to Warzel, in 2024, we were already living in a “post-truth universe” where it’s “difficult for anyone to believe anything they didn’t witness themselves.”<br>Many others have made similar arguments.<br>My expectation, too, was that AI would exacerbate this problem—that just as social media, photoshop, and video editing technology had proliferated deepfakes on the internet—for instance, tricking people into believing a faked photo of Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga jacket or, in less funny development, into losing hundreds of thousands of dollars—AI was set to make all of that even worse.

Balenciaga Pope deepfake<br>But I’ve come to suspect AI might have the exact opposite effect. Instead of fracturing our shared reality, this handful of AIs seems to be piecing it back together.<br>Centralizing vs. decentralizing technologies

The printing press was invented in 1440.1 Before that, books were produced by hand, which made them incredibly expensive and meant that, even if it had been attempted, mass literacy was functionally impossible. According to one study of Western European medieval literacy, less than 20% of the population could read.<br>During the 1300s, all of Western Europe produced 2.7 million books. Compare that to the 12.5 million printed books produced from 1454 to 1500 alone. The following century saw 217 million books produced, and the rest is history.<br>Many people expected the printing press to act as a decentralizing force; after all, once the cost of producing written text had gone down, many more people could print what they wanted. The cost of producing books fell by 67% in the half-century after the invention of the printing press.<br>Contemporaneous thinkers were both terrified and excited by the prospect of less centralized control over the written word.<br>John Foxe, an English clergyman from the 1500s, reported that the Catholic vicar of Croydon, preaching at Paul’s Cross under Henry VIII, argued that “either the Pope must abolish knowledge & printyng, or printyng at length will roote him out.”<br>Foxe explained that the Pope’s primacy was based on the unsophistication of Christians and that printing would change all that: “nothyng made the Pope strōg in time past, but lacke of knowledge, and ignoraunce of simple Christians: so contrarywise now nothyng doth debilitate and shake þe hie spire of his Papacie so much as reading, preaching, knowledge and iudgement, that is to saye, the fruite of printyng.”<br>On the other side, William Tyndale, a leader in the Protestant Reformation who would soon use the new technology to print thousands of New Testaments and smuggle them into England, crowed over the possibility of overthrowing the papacy:<br>“I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you.”

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Twentieth-century historiography has repeated this argument. Most famously, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s landmark book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change contends that print culture produced books that were “internalized by silent and solitary readers” and gave rise to a “voice of individual conscience.”<br>Certainly Martin Luther’s pamphlet revolution against the Catholic Church would have been impossible without the printing press, but to see only the press’s decentralizing effects is to miss how it also enabled the creation of common cultures and even the...