Thank you and I see your point. Indeed, the industry and mass media (including marketing) keeps social engineering and dirty tricks for getting more customers of unrelated people.

Actually, the good idea of listening to customers, knowing their actual needs is not new but is still not really popular among marketing, etc. (Too much data, too lazy to evaluate, better we overthrow them with ads and commercials).

It’s surely a task of educational institutions (beginning from the school), of media and of us as parents to raise awareness about the perception and about media in our kids. (And if they then mistrust media, who speaks about possibilities to be mistrusted, it’s already an advanced level :-) )

Back to my school time in Germany, my teacher told me very wise idea (and it works strangely only in German) — the difference between Realität (existent reality) and Wirklichkeit (perceived reality, objectivity): we cannot tell we knew “existent reality”, since we don’t know it from all perspectives. We speak about “perceived reality”, what we do know — and it differs in various interpretations. (I will write a blog on this topic, since this differentiation is crucial and should be spread already from the school times to prevent all those misunderstandings and conflicts of our world)

Others — and here I am with you — swearing in testimony, or in the law context, when people speak in this context about truth, it isn’t about what they suppose, it’s about what was actually happened, about facts, about data, which is singular. That’s true, and cannot (may not) be faked.

E.g. “X killed Y” — as “Realität” (not “Wirklichkeit”), there are no another ways, no other answers. But why X killed Y is another story (interpretation, argumentation, motives: “accidentally”, “mischievously”, “as self-defense” etc.), here we are again in a wide area of interpretation.

So saying “there is no truth” I don’t mean facts or data, I rather mean the objective handling with this data: “there as many truths as people”. But data and facts are always singular (at least if we don’t speak about quantum computing — there even provenance doesn’t work anymore, #superposition).

Luckily, AI researchers are speaking a lot about ethics, for example AI NOW Institute with their very relevant Ethic Reports.

Let’s be aware of fakes and let’s help others to orient themself in this world! :)