It’s getting harder to know exactly what we’re looking at online.
That’s certainly true in politics. As we shared this week, campaigns are increasingly using AI to depict their opponents in ways that would have required a lot more work just a few election cycles ago.
Texas actually got out ahead of some of this back in 2019, becoming one of the first states to restrict deceptive AI-generated political advertising. But that law only kicks in during the 30 days before an election.
That struck me as part of a much bigger change in our online lives. Technology isn’t just changing what we watch; increasingly, it’s asking us to make judgments about what’s real and what happens next.
Which brings me to this week’s Talk of Texas question. Sports betting and so-called “prediction” sites seem to be everywhere now — attached to games, ads, apps, podcasts and seemingly every spare corner of the internet.
I want to know how much they’ve entered your life. Do you bet on sports? Use prediction markets? Have friends or family who do? Does it make watching a game more fun, or does the sheer ubiquity of it all bother you?
Record a message for us at texasstandard.org/talk.
