AI is losing its credibility.

AI is following the trajectory of other media. A seismic shift has unfolded across multiple pillars of societal influence, in the last two decades. It is falling credibility of traditional news media, Hollywood, Bollywood, political analysis, and now artificial intelligence or AI systems. Each institution has undergone a similar trajectory of decay marked by elite detachment from the lived realities of their audiences or users. It resulted in widening credibility gaps and the rise of alternatives outside the elite-controlled mainstream.

Media’s Crisis of Credibility

At the heart of this collapse lies the traditional media’s credibility crisis. Esteemed news outlets steadily eroded their own trust through repeated failures. Its overt political biases became glaring, the race to fill 24-hour news cycles favored sensationalism over accuracy. Egregious reporting errors (for example, misleading WMD claims in Iraq) accumulated without sufficient accountability. The media’s business model pivoted to chasing clicks and views. It preferred privileged engagement metrics over factual rigor. The corporate ownership’s influence over editorial lines became too apparent to ignore.

Social media and platforms like YouTube provided a counterpoint. It offered people firsthand access to raw footage, primary documents. Independent creators who cultivated parasocial bonds that felt more authentic than faceless anchors. These platforms empowered communities to engage interactively, breaking the traditional one-way broadcast dynamic into a dialogue. Crucially, alternative media voices tackled neglected perspectives, especially during politically divisive moments. The mainstream media often presented a unified, sometimes ideological, narrative but could not compete.

Algorithmic amplification further accelerated this ecosystem by promoting highly engaging, often polarizing content. It created echo chambers that relentlessly reinforced skepticism of traditional news.

Yet, this democratization came at a price. It was rampant misinformation, uneven quality without editorial checks, and financial incentives that mirrored corporate media’s corruptions. Paradoxically, audiences came to trust transparent flaws in independent creators as more genuine. The polished, supposedly objective but apparently biased institutional media lost credibility.

Entertainment’s Parallel Descent: Hollywood and Bollywood

The entertainment industry mirrors this same arc of elite disconnection. Hollywood is depicted as an insular bubble of creators preoccupied with their own fraught personal histories. Their marriages and relationships, anxieties, privilege were projected onto their work. This creates an artistic echo chamber fixated on dysfunctional narratives that alienated broad audiences seeking more relatable stories. Hollywood lost to regional cinema, English, Spanish, Korean or even Telugu.

Bollywood exemplifies this trend uniquely in the post-2020 landscape. Superstars increasingly distanced from everyday Indian realities. Their in lavish lifestyles produced movies with similar charactors, disconnected with realities. They have struggled to produce genuine hits. Instead, middle-class rooted narratives like family dramas and authentic stories like “Panchayat” or “Gullak” have surged in popularity. It resonated deeply with audiences yearning for stability and relatability. The pervasive presence of Bollywood megastars as brand ambassadors for everyday consumer goods symbolizes a profound loss of artistic credibility. Megastars are reduced to marketing icons from being cultural leaders.

Both industries suffer the same core problem. The institutional elites were crafting contents through the prism of their privileged anxieties, losing alignment with the diverse lived experiences of their audiences. By contrast, the artists like Amitabh Bachchan and singer like Phil Collins demonstrate how personal pain can be transmuted into universal art.

Political Analysis of Election by AI

This pattern extends starkly into contemporary political analysis powered by AI. The catastrophic failure of ChatGPT  in forecasting the 2025 Bihar assembly election dramatically illustrates the perils of elite bubble thinking masquerading as objective analysis. ChatGPT’s confident prediction of a dominant INDIA Alliance victory was overturned by an NDA landslide, exposing core analytical errors:

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  A mechanical view of caste data ignored complex sub-caste dynamics and resentment.

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  Elite assumptions presumed caste arithmetic would automatically convert into vote.

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  Political credibility failures, like Nitish Kumar’s opportunism, were overestimated.

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  Alliance unity was overestimated despite local rivalries and voter fragmentation.

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  Modi’s personal popularity, welfare programs, and ground-level RSS machine were massively underrated.

The model’s training on English-language media, academic caste frameworks, and social media discourse, dominated by anti-BJP elites, missed essentials. On-the-ground sentiments verified by local journalists was ignored. It replicated precisely the same disconnects that doomed mainstream media and Hollywood.

AI Censorship and Gatekeeping

More insidiously, beneath analytical failure lies active information suppression within AI systems. ChatGPT’s refusal to simply format a historically important but “inflammatory” document like Macaulay’s 1835 Minute revealing colonial cultural imperialism. It is an example of  gatekeeping. While the AI confidently generated election predictions that were disastrously wrong, it declined straightforward technical tasks that unpack uncomfortable colonial truths.

This selective censorship reveals that AI is actively protecting elite sensibilities. It sought to obscure inconvenient historical realities that undermine the narrative in favour of British Colonial rule. Irony is that colonial-era elites sought to create a class of Indians who think like their colonizers and it reaps result even after 200 years. The modern AI systems trained primarily on elite discourse now implicitly reproduce this cultural gatekeeping by censoring evidence of colonial ethno-supremacy.

Universal Pattern of Institutional Decay:

From the print press, TV news, and Hollywood to Bollywood and now AI, the cycle unfolds identically:

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   Genuine connection with the public.

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   Elite capture, where creators and analysts become insular and aligned with power.

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   Replacement of lived reality by elite consensus.

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   Active suppression or dismissal of dissenting or uncomfortable truths.

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   Confident but spectacular failure.

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   Replacement by alternative voices closer to ground truth.

Unlike traditional institutions that took decades, AI’s trajectory is compressed into a few years due to rapid feedback, user scrutiny, and emerging open-source alternatives.

Count Down of AI Brown Sahib

The “Brown Sahib” image from colonial India i.e. Indians trained to police their own culture for a Western elite, finds a modern analogue in AI systems like ChatGPT. These systems interpret and mediate knowledge between elites and the masses but have become so alienated that they misinterpret the people they serve.

Worse, they actively censor uncomfortable truths while generating confidently inaccurate analysis that reinforces elite narratives. In doing so, AI not only echoes but accelerates institutional decay witnessed in media and entertainment.

The audience has already moved on, seeking alternatives beyond the gatekept mainstream. AI’s crisis is not a bug but an inherent feature of its current design and training. A telling continuation of a centuries-long cultural and institutional bankruptcy now playing out in real-time.

The trajectory is written on wall. It will meet the same fate. Replacement by better alternative. That is the law of commerce, enforced by market, without elite intervention.