LAST week, my wife stumbled on a fashion site that boasts an “AI-assisted” editor: in other words, a Chat-GPT session that produces sentences such as “The puffball skirt is back thanks to this fun little dress. . . It reminds me of the dresses I wore as a teenager but linen makes it feel more grown up,” and, “I also just watched Celine Dion’s documentary,” as well as the usual word salad — her style is “Elevated, polished, fashion-forward and a little bit extra. I like classic items combined with something a bit unexpected — like a big shoulder or a killer accessory.”

These sentences are the product of a computer programme that has never been a teenager and has not, in fact, worn any clothes at all. Everything it “said” was a lie and an imposture. This horrified my wife.

My own reaction was entirely different. As a working reporter, I knew that almost everything anyone said for public consumption was an attempt at manipulation, and I would just scan for the quotable bits. What might be true or false was whether someone said something. Whether the thing that they said was true was something above my pay grade — interesting, perhaps, but no part of the news.

The necessity of thinking like that is one reason that I disliked being a news reporter and was never very good at it. None the less, it is a useful discipline, and, given the right audience — one that understands what honest reporting can and cannot prove — it can be very effective in giving the reader the material to make up their minds.

The trouble is that making up a mind requires some effort. Far better to use a ready-made-up mind, as we all do on almost every subject except the ones that really interest us. It is very misleading to argue, as lazy sceptics do, that we choose to believe all kinds of things that we could just as well choose not to believe. We couldn’t. It’s like arguing that we choose to fly the Atlantic when we could just as well row across.

THE second drawback of the neutral report is that it doesn’t answer the question that we really care about, which is not “Is this report true?” but “Does it matter?” or “Should I care?” In mass-market papers, the answer is almost by definition “No.” As one of the characters in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop explains, “News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.”

This looked like a witty if rather dystopian view until the internet came along. The ad-supported internet has vastly enlarged the quantity of stuff available for the chap who doesn’t care much about anything. And, thanks to what is called AI, there is now far more than even Google can keep track of, and it appears that Google has, in recent weeks, given up on the ambition to index everything on the web.

The process started well before the internet was invented, and it was apparent to everyone who worried about the mass media of the 20th century, from T. H. White to Hannah Arendt. But it is now unstoppable, and actively encouraged by tyrants and would-be tyrants. From Putin to Trump, they all want their followers to believe that “Everything is possible and nothing is true” — but this message is attractive because it implies something really important and undeniably true: that you, the audience, can change nothing, and might as well believe anything you like.

Compare this with the good democratic message that you, as a voter, can change the world, and it is obvious why many people prefer to have it frankly acknowledged that they can’t. It’s one less thing to worry about.

STILL, the net made possible one new horror. Not only has it further atomised and isolated the indifferent: at the same time, it has bonded together everyone with a passionate particular interest and allowed them to create their own mythologies. The two tendencies work together against democracy, and even against the possibility of public-service journalism. As the AI-boosted fashion site makes clear, the old test of “Did they really say it?” breaks down when there’s really no “they” there to say it. Everything becomes a press release. And, when everything is possible and nothing is true, democracy cannot work.

The obvious answer is to demand that the old ideals of objectivity be dropped. I see a lot of this on the American Left and its demand that no one should report Trump as if he ever told the truth. But, if you’re doing that to win an election, it won’t work. It is not going to persuade anyone who disagrees. This is a horrible fact to face; so people don’t. Both Right and Left come to see the views — and, eventually, even the votes — of their opponents as unreal, illegitimate.

Nothing like that could ever happen in church politics, of course.