Why We Need a 'Truth Campaign' for the AI Era | TechPolicy.PressPerspective<br>Why We Need a 'Truth Campaign' for the AI Era<br>Gaurav Laroia, Charlotte Slaiman / Jul 2, 2026Gaurav Laroia and Charlotte Slaiman both previously served at the Federal Trade Commission. They recently published a memo, “Settlement Wins Against Big Tech Should Underwrite Digital Resilience Funds,” at the Federation of American Scientists.<br>AI is Everywhere by Ariyana Ahmad & The Bigger Picture / Better Images of AI / CC by 4.0
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As former attorney-advisors to Federal Trade Commission leadership, we worked hard to turn the page on the era when Big Tech could write off fines for alleged lawbreaking as just the “cost of doing business.” We fought to impose real, substantive limits on corporate data collection and to change the extractive business models fueling digital platforms. But our time in the trenches also taught us a hard truth: while strong injunctive relief and market reforms are vital, enforcement alone isn’t enough.<br>To truly protect the public, legal and regulatory action should be paired with a massive, proactive public education campaign. Today, as the honeymoon phase for generative AI ends and state attorneys general launch mounting lawsuits against chatbot developers, we have the momentary opportunity to do just that: fund a “Truth Campaign” for the AI era.<br>The scale of these compounding digital harms resembles an environmental disaster rather than a series of unconnected consumer injuries. Pew polling shows that half of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI, and most doubt their ability to tell whether words or images came from a machine. Gen Z seems to be increasingly anxious about this technology’s impact on their lives. A recent Gallup poll shows their levels of optimism plummeting about how helpful the technology can be in education and especially as deployed in the workforce.<br>During the social media era, tech companies used algorithmic feeds to hijack our attention and our outrage. Generative AI, with its ability to mimic human communication and create photorealistic images, instead hijacks our trust, imagination, and empathy. As people anthropomorphize chatbots, we are witnessing a rise in parasocial dependency and loneliness and a sharp decline in critical thinking. When a machine uses natural language, our brains are hardwired to assign it empathy and cognition. This illusion of companionship creates a dangerous vulnerability.<br>Many of these immediate and acute threats are happening to consumers right now. We are seeing a surge in sophisticated, personalized scams driven by technology like voice-cloning and the proliferation of deepfakes used for bullying and harassment. These harms also extend into our physical and civic lives. Flawed facial recognition systems have led to wrongful arrests that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. The unchecked flood of synthetic media threatens to erode baseline public trust in our shared reality. From opaque hiring algorithms to workplace surveillance, these are personal and systemic harms that thrive in an environment of confusion and low digital literacy.<br>The public is desperately asking for help. It wants clear, unbiased guidance on navigating AI, but right now the balance of messaging is coming from the tech companies themselves. These companies have little financial incentive to tell their users to be skeptical. Chatbots have been marketed as oracles, research assistants, and digital friends. The public needs to know the reality: that these tools are predictive text machines, that they can hallucinate, they are not great at verifying facts, and the intimate information users share with them can be used to train future models.<br>People deserve concrete solutions. Independent, public interest research and tools could help verify if an image or audio clip is real or synthetic, K-12 training on media skepticism could help protect children from algorithmic manipulation, training for workers to understand their rights if AI is being used for surveillance, or even better funding for the states’ prosecutorial and investigatory apparatus around tech harms could help. But without dedicated funding, who will be able to build and maintain these resources?<br>We are currently fighting an asymmetric battle on messaging with the companies. They have billions to spend on marketing to spin their narrative on AI. Public interest efforts cannot rely on shoestring budgets to provide the public accurate information. We need a massive and well-resourced investment in the truth to ensure that clear and unbiased guidance reaches the public where they are. We cannot miss this opportunity to build durable civic infrastructure to protect the public. Nor can we afford to subject another generation to the uncontrolled societal experiment that characterized the social media era. Regulators then relied on headline fines that simply disappeared into general government...