# Glossary

Terms used in the documentary and supporting research.

## Publishing friction

The time and effort required to research, write, record, edit, and publish content.

**Category:** Content economics.

## Infinite content

A condition where the marginal cost of producing additional content approaches zero.

**Category:** Content economics.

## AI-generated content

Articles, images, voices, podcasts, videos, or other media produced substantially by generative AI.

**Category:** Synthetic media.

## AI influencers

Synthetic personas designed to resemble human creators and build audiences or commercial partnerships.

**Category:** Synthetic media.

## Synthetic media

Media generated or substantially altered by software rather than directly recorded from human activity.

**Category:** Synthetic media.

## Consensus bias

The tendency of AI systems to reproduce common patterns, established advice, and average best practices.

**Category:** Information quality.

## Content convergence

Different outputs becoming increasingly similar because they draw from the same models, patterns, and training data.

**Category:** Information quality.

## Model training data

Human and machine-created information used to train or refine AI systems.

**Category:** AI infrastructure.

## Synthetic training data

Machine-generated information used to train later AI systems.

**Category:** AI infrastructure.

## Model collapse

A researched failure mode in which recursive training on generated data can degrade model performance or diversity.

**Category:** AI research.

## Hall of mirrors effect

A metaphor for machines learning from copies of earlier machine-generated copies.

**Category:** Information quality.

## Credibility scarcity

The idea that trusted provenance becomes more valuable as information production becomes abundant.

**Category:** Trust.

## Provenance

Information about who or what created a piece of content and how it was produced.

**Category:** Trust.

## Human-origin signal

Evidence that content reflects direct human experience, observation, testing, or judgment.

**Category:** Trust.

## Content saturation

An environment in which the volume of published media exceeds the attention available to consume it.

**Category:** Content economics.

## Machine-to-machine content

Content generated by machines primarily for indexing, ranking, summarization, or ingestion by other machines.

**Category:** AI web.

## Average best practices

Widely repeated guidance that may be useful but tends to produce undifferentiated outputs.

**Category:** Information quality.

## Authenticity uncertainty

The growing difficulty of determining whether a person, voice, image, review, or story is genuine.

**Category:** Trust.

## Information ecosystem

The network of people, platforms, models, and media through which knowledge is created and circulated.

**Category:** Internet.

## Human-to-human connection

Direct interaction that preserves context, empathy, multidimensionality, and social cues.

**Category:** Trust.