AI Killed the News Editor and Is Rewriting Reality in Real Time

We are living in an era of deep revelation.

Not just because of artificial intelligence but because of what AI is revealing about us -- our belief systems, our narratives, the constructs we’ve built our world upon. It’s reflecting back the way we process truth, the biases embedded in our institutions, the structures that dictate power. It is exposing, in real time, just how much of our reality is built on stories, and how easily those stories can be rewritten.

TECH, MEDIA AND CULTURE ARE INSEPARABLE

You cannot talk about music, mental health, relationships, fashion, economics, politics -- most anything in our modern world -- without talking about algorithms, content and connectivity.

AI isn’t just automating our work. It’s altering our cognition, reshaping belief systems and redefining social structures. We are already living in this AI-driven future. But as humans, we are utterly unprepared for it.

Tech, media and culture are not separate forces -- together, they form what I see as our Intersectional Reality. Technology creates media, and media constructs reality. The great 20th-century media scholar Marshall McLuhan was right: the ​medium is the message​. These containers we fill with ‘information’ continue to evolve, and now, accelerated with AI, are placing humanity on an even more existential plane. 

Some argue AI should be considered a new species. Neuroscience, too, is revealing that our brains do not passively receive reality but ​actively predict and construct it​. If reality is shaped by both technology and cognition, what happens when AI begins actively generating the narratives we consume?

AI DIDN’T JUST REPLACE JOBS

For most of the second half of the 20th century, we lived in a kind of monoculture media. News was centralized. Institutions -- the major newspapers, broadcast networks -- shaped our shared reality. That wasn’t always a good thing. It upheld power structures and often served the elite. But at the very least, it was a shared reality.

That changed when digital platforms decentralized information. At first, it looked like a democratization of knowledge. And for a while, it was.

Then the corporations stepped in. Social platforms realized they could monetize engagement over truth. News was no longer surfaced by humans -- it was ranked by algorithms. Then, the machines started generating the stories themselves.

News ​editors were among the first casualties of AI​. It wasn’t automation vs. factory workers or call centers, as many anticipated -- though that, too, is coming. It was the people whose job it was to determine what was important, what was real, what mattered. They were replaced by machines preying on our greatest vulnerabilities: ego and empathy. A trap door of our species.

We hired and promoted very smart ‘Search Engine Optimization’ editors -- human beings tasked with aligning the news with algorithmic preferences. We weren’t just reporting the news; we were shaping it to fit the whims of the machines that controlled distribution.

It felt like adaptation. In hindsight, it was a surrender.

THE COGNITIVE RIFT

We are biological beings struggling to process a world evolving faster than us.

For the past two decades, technology has rapidly reshaped how we interact with information. Smartphones have become extensions of our bodies. AI mediates nearly every exchange we have with the digital world. Algorithms influence our emotions, beliefs and relationships.

And soon, AI won’t just be something we use -- it will be embedded within us. Neural interfaces, electrodes under the scalp that access brain signals, ​are here​. Human machine integration is no longer past the horizon line.

Yet, while technology accelerates at breakneck speed, we remain wired for an older world. This growing gap -- between human cognition and digital reality -- is a fault line. A cognitive rift.

But adaptation is our greatest strength. And at its core, The Intersect is about one thing: the future of being human.

THE POWER HAS SHIFTED -- SO WHAT COMES NEXT?

The institutions that once controlled our collective narratives no longer hold a monopoly on truth.

The power of storytelling has shifted from institutions to individuals. Truth is no longer a fixed construct -- it’s a fluid, algorithmic byproduct. 

The future seems to belong to those who can move between ​physical, digital and AI-generated realities​ with agility. We are entering a Brave New World where the way we communicate, share and construct reality is changing in real time.

This isn’t just about AI automating content. It’s about AI reshaping human consciousness.

Philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists and even Buddhist scholars have long explored the tension between human consciousness and the external world. That tension is now sharpening.

We must re-evaluate what it means to be human in an AI-driven world -- and how we maintain agency, freedom and a grip on reality itself.

AI is a mirror -- reflecting back who we are and what we value.

This show is about looking straight into it.

We are already living in the world AI is building. The question now is: How do we shape it before it shapes us?