I spent the first decade of my career getting lied to by professionals. Government officials, corporate spokespeople, charming entrepreneurs with persuasive slides and nothing behind them. The skill I developed was not cynicism. It was verification. Every claim gets checked. Every number gets sourced. Every confident assertion gets tested against the available evidence.

That habit saved me from publishing nonsense roughly once a week for forty years. And now I watch people feed a question into ChatGPT, read the output, and paste it straight into a client deliverable without a single check. They treat AI like a colleague who went to a better university. It is not a colleague. It is a pattern-completion engine with no relationship to truth.

The interesting thing is that this is not a new problem. It is an old problem wearing a different outfit. And the journalists, researchers, and analysts who already know how to verify sources have an enormous advantage over those who never needed to learn.