NEDERLAND — The Mountain-Ear received word last week from the National Newspaper Association that Meta (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads, and Meta AI) has “revised its proposed commercial terms” by “narrowing the provision to advertising and business products” to its collection of material from its platforms for use in “training” its products.

Which implies that so far it has been devouring everything on these platforms in order to enhance the usefulness of AI. Forget “intellectual property”—if you posted it on a Meta platform, they can use it to train their AI programs as they mimic human beings in creating more material for these platforms, with no acknowledgement or compensation.

We already see too much on social media that is AI-generated. Those all-too-cute reels demonstrating love between oddly-assorted animals? Reality or AI? Meals that seem to design and create themselves? What else?

We’ve been warned about “deepfakes,” AI creations online that are impossible to distinguish from actual videos. And in this, the most volatile and angry election season in my lifetime, we are undoubtedly seeing many AI-created campaign ads and posts (some, we know, personally created by the current resident of the White House).

While it used to be possible to turn to social media for pleasure, we now have to be concerned about virtually every post we see: Is this real, or is it AI? Video used to be considered a “true” version of an event, but with AI so dominant, how can we know if anything we see online is “true”?

With AI having so far gobbled up most of the printed universe, we already know that AI can lie, though it is more likely accidentally to spew untruths.

This leaves journalism in a tenuous and awkward position. Even though we check our information for accuracy, how can we be absolutely sure anything we publish is accurate unless we’ve seen it in person? And how can any of us be sure that what we read or see online or on TV is real?

No answers here, folks. Just questions. And deeply uneasy feelings.