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Good morning. Three unrelated stories this week indicate it’s been a bad one for confidence in our age of information. There was havoc in a small village in northern Wales, caused by a stream of cars looking for a non-existent Aldi store that mysteriously appeared on Google Maps. More seriously, there were calls on Apple to withdraw the AI feature on new iPhones that has been generating inaccurate news alerts by incorrectly summarising Â鶹Éç news stories. And then on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will get rid of all its fact-checkers.

The responsibility for consuming unreliable information, it seems, falls on us, its consumers. This may seem a modern-day challenge, but humans have always had to question and determine what to accept as true, useful, or good. The Vedic texts point out four aspects of our psychology that often lead us astray. We can rarely ascertain the full picture; we make mistakes; we’re prone to delusion; and we have a tendency to cheat, sometimes others, and sometimes ourselves. We thus tend to see what we want to see, and to believe what we want to believe. In this respect, the Vedic warning is that we each can become a source of misinformation and fake news for ourselves.

Recently I received a post from some friends within our faith community. It was an image of President Trump and President Putin together with a placard that read: Chant Hare Krishna for Peace. It didn’t require great thought to see this was obviously a joke that had been AI generated. But the more we share such false images, the more we may be eroding the trust that we should have in actual sources of information and wisdom.

The Vedas urge us to be attentive to all we see and hear. It defines intelligence – not as IQ – but as the ability to discern and deliberate accurately. It highlights the features of intelligence as engaging rational doubt and of overcoming misapprehension to see things as they are. The wise, it says, can discriminate between the real and the unreal; between what is beneficial and what is harmful; between what is valuable and what is less important; and what is permanent and what is transient.

The UK government is suggesting it will introduce tougher regulation for media platforms to remove misleading and harmful material. But falsehoods and illusions are insidious and as the Gita suggests, perhaps we can never escape our personal responsibility to be wise and intelligent fact-checkers of all the information we digest.

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