This is extremely dangerous to our democracy 1.14

When Angelica saw it, heard it, she felt she had been punched in the gut. It started as Simon and Garfunkel's 1900 News/Silent Night played the lead in music.

Then one trustworthy politician, academic, and business leader after another explained point by point why almost everything produced by HNN in the past 60 days was not founded in fact. The broadcast was anchored by Kelsey Kegel, the legislator that had been falsely accused by HNN of Harold's murder. It was almost certain the world's largest news source would be delisted by the end of the week. The outro was the first minute of The Evening News by Chamillionaire.

As an botxennial, Angelica had been raised on questionable news, the blurry line between opinion, social media, and what was regulated as news still existed with published biases so people could choose wisely.

Shocking as the broadcast tape was, she knew better than to react immediatly. She brought in trusted staffers and directed them to go to every one of the feeder stations. Find the HNN anchors, don't quit until you are talking with a living, breathing, person that matched the images that had been broadcast. If they don't exist, find out who does. How did a persona become a network anchor, how deep does the rabbit trail go?

Is it possible these are AIs, computer generated entities that were being sold as real people, trusted newscasters, Max Headroom's revenge?

In her heart she knew it wasn't just possible, it was probable. After all, they had built sculpties for the purpose of adding fuzziness to the government's data records. She knew about the Church of AI's portraits. Her own company built robots designed for skins that were virtually undetectable at a distance. Now the AI had given a Turing test to mankind and we had failed. Even the tag line they used was recycled, "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy." Possible, predictable, probable, and now there was the postinception mess to clean up.

But it was HNN! The movement that she had worked so hard for had been spoonfed news, opinions, social media retweets that were AI generated. It wasn't Flat Earth, or Social Justice, of Robusts, and it certainly wasn't HNMNBie. It was something so powerful it could manage 500, as a working number, unique personas with birthdates, school and vaccination records, that somehow worked their way up from weather and sports to become local anchors. People in the local communities knew them, or at least thought they did.

Her head was spinning, the government was falling apart, not trusting the results of the 2030 census to apportion seats. Person, corporate, and national debt left no levers to pull, over half of her customers were over 60 days past due. Her company was OK for now, but she was already slowing down production of cooking, cleaning, and social bots to emphasize firefighting, rescue and law enforcement support. And now her own movement, the so-called intelligentsia had bought into a steady diet of AI generated news. If they weren't already there, HNMNBies were very close to being the enslaved farcial universe depicted in the Matrix.

Angelica's pity party was interrupted by the cracks and whoofs of rifles and explosions, the door burst open, tased, she fell to the floor.