What The Hell Should Be Done

Someone (OP) posted "AI is ruining everything. " and "... AI was invented to distort the facts, create false realities and make everyone disoriented and unable to trust anything that they see, to make them more susceptible to extremism ..."

It was followed by the comment:

Using AI for lying, disguise reality, reverse the truth, has to be a crime ! Specially by fake journalists and politics. They can use AI to double check before posting any lies. Make people accountables for their acts !!! I (Bob Trower replied: People are accountable for their acts. We don't need any more moronic government interference by people who have zero clue about technology and AI. When I wrote voice recognition stuff and CASE stuff in the 1980s I was not doing it to 'flood the zone' and further project 2025. I've been 'all in' on current LLM based AI since 2023. The umbrella project for that is https://VeryTrue.com, started more than two decades ago, before current AI was 'a thing'. It's a pretty safe bet that of the billion people using it now, most are not actively intending to use it for harm. Our problem is that the people in power are often very bad people and we've all been raised on power friendly cultural propoganda with origins millenia old. The 'truth' you think is being reversed is not likely 'true' entirely. Your apprehension of 'logic', 'fact', 'truth', and 'history', even math, physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy are all incomplete and not nearly the bedrock people think it is. Canada's Bill C-18 is a perfect example of the government destructively interfering with the web and harming people.

I received a reply: Bob Trower , okay so what the hell should be done instead? 🤷 Corporations have way too much power and that's a huge problem.

Response:

We should all, as many of us as possible, agree to this Covenant:

https://dapaday.blogspot.com/2025/12/CovenantOfCoreRights.html

When people ask for the government to "make lying a crime" or ban tools, they imagine a benevolent referee. In practice, whoever holds political power decides what counts as "truth" and what counts as a "crime" (as seen in initiatives like Canada's Bill C-18 or attempts to criminalize dissent). Handing the state a toggle switch for allowed speech doesn't hurt bad actors—it hands them a weapon when they take office.

That doesn’t mean doing nothing or letting giant tech platforms run wild. The Covenant of Core Rights (link) sets an architectural "moral floor" that tackles the problem at its roots:

1. End Algorithmic Domination (§1.5 — The Right to Truth): The issue isn’t that someone typed a lie or used an LLM to draft a bad take. The crime of modern platforms is systemic cognitive extraction—engineering algorithmic feeds designed to addict, radicalize, amplify outrage, and distort reality for ad revenue. Platforms shouldn’t be censored on viewpoint, but they must be stripped of their immunity when they intentionally architect deceptive and addictive feedback loops.

2. Break Corporate Captivity (§1.3 — Meaningful Exit): Corporations have unchecked power because users and creators cannot leave without financial or social ruin. A core tenet of the Covenant is that people must have real interoperability and the right of exit—portable identity, data sovereignty, and open protocols—so no single platform holds a monopoly over the public square or someone's livelihood.

3. Hold Bad Actors Personally Accountable (§1.8 & §1.8A — Expression vs. Harm): You protect open discourse, whistleblowing, and dissent, but you enforce clear duty-of-care standards. If someone maliciously defames, impersonates, doxxes, or commits demonstrable fraud using an AI tool, they are already liable for the harmful act. We prosecute the fraud and the violence—not the word processor, the microphone, or the neural net used to carry it out.

4. Mental Autonomy as an Inviolable Right (§1.2): We need legal recognition that our internal attention and cognitive environments are sovereign spaces. Tech monopolies shouldn't be permitted to deploy psychological enclosure or predatory micro-targeting to deliberately fracture public consensus for profit.

We don't fix the problem of unchecked corporate power by creating unchecked state censorship. We fix it by building decentralized architectures, enforcing strict liability for platform manipulation, guaranteeing portable data rights, and agreeing to a universal moral floor that puts human and sentient agency above corporate extraction.