Technology and Romanticism: Is It Human or Machine That Is Malfunction?
During the first week of the 2026 Iran war, artificial intelligence-generated content spread across social media faster than any verification process could keep pace with. BBC Verify reported that AI-generated war footage surged as content creators used the technology to profit from viral engagement (Copeland, BBC Verify, 7 March 2026). Among the fabricated material, a video showing an Iranian aircraft supposedly confronting a US naval vessel was viewed more than seven million times (Carter & Workman, ABC News Australia, 4 March 2026), while a fake image of a blood-stained child’s backpack lying in rubble, framed as evidence of the strike on a girls’ school in Minab, was posted by Iran’s embassy in Austria. Even the platforms built to authenticate reality struggled: The Guardian reported that Google’s Gemini and X’s chatbot Grok both misidentified a genuine mass-burial photograph from the Minab strike, one attributing it to the 2023 Turkey earthquake, the other to a 2021 pandemic burial site in Jakarta (McClure, The Guardian, 17 March 2026). This has become status quo in today’s digital landscape: information now travels and multiplies long before anyone confirms it is real.
What this status quo exposes, however, is not merely a flaw in artificial intelligence, but a flaw in how humanity chooses to use it. Humanity must have a code by which to live, a moral sense by which to judge, and a common sense by which to act. Thus humanity itself is the executor of these principles, because principles cannot preserve themselves, nor can they enforce themselves independently. And when their execution fails, perhaps the question is not whether the system has malfunctioned, but whether its executor has. The events above suggest the same problem, it is as if humanity loses sight of its own principles, to the point where common sense is no longer common. Chaos can easily be found particularly on social media, where hoaxes, posts and sayings that are altered from the actual information are shared easily across platforms, posted deliberately and gladly. It is not evolution; it is chaotic discretion covered by novelty, while something bigger is happening beneath the surface: a species equipped with reason increasingly prefers convenience over verification, novelty over sanity, and virality over truth. This raises the question this writing intends to answer: Are we, in embracing artificial intelligence so uncritically, romanticising our own ignorance under the guise of technological sophistication?
Automation Bias: When Trust Replaces Thought
In human factors research, Parasuraman and Manzey (2010) describe a phenomenon called automation bias, the tendency of humans to accept the output of an automated system without independent verification, simply because the system is assumed to be objective, tireless, and less fallible than a human being. This is not laziness in the ordinary sense; it is a cognitive shortcut, a way of saving mental effort by outsourcing judgment to a machine. Automation bias becomes dangerous precisely when the automation itself is wrong, and the human overseeing it no longer bothers, or no longer knows how, to check. It is the mirror image of what this writing has been arguing so far: a common sense that has quietly handed itself over to novelty, mistaking convenience for correctness.
Criteria of Malfunction in Humanity: Romanticised Ignorance
Drawing from this pattern, romanticised ignorance in the age of artificial intelligence can be identified through several characteristics.
The first characteristic is uncritical delegation of judgement. A person no longer asks whether something is true, only whether an application says it is. That is not innovation and adaptation in today’s world; rather, it is the total absence of the most important human brain function: thinking.
Secondly, speed over verification. Content is shared, believed, and acted upon within seconds, long before any credible source has confirmed it, because being first now carries more social reward than being right.
More subtly, the third is novelty mistaken for authority. A tool being new, advanced, or
artificially intelligent is treated as proof of its reliability, even when it demonstrably fails.
The problem then becomes more consequential when novelty and virality acquire financial value. It leads to a fourth, monetised deception, where virality itself becomes an incentive, so fabrication is not always an accident; sometimes it is a business model.
Ultimately, repetition produces collective normalisation. Once enough people share and believe a falsehood, correcting it feels almost impolite, as though truth has become the disruptive opinion instead of the shared foundation it once was.
The Iran War as a Mirror
The AI misinformation surrounding the 2026 Iran war demonstrates all five characteristics with uncomfortable clarity. Content creators exploited the chaos deliberately, producing viral falsehoods for profit, prompting X to threaten a ninety-day demonetisation for undisclosed AIgenerated conflict imagery within the war’s first week alone. Old footage from Ukraine and China was relabeled as fresh explosions in Israel; a genuine mass-grave photograph from the Minab school strike was misidentified by Gemini as an unrelated 2023 earthquake and by Grok as a 2021 pandemic burial in Jakarta, meaning the very tools meant to authenticate reality instead re-fabricated it. Even a sitting president, reportedly, briefly believed a deepfake video before military officials corrected him. What unites these incidents is not merely deception, but willing, almost eager, participation in being deceived, because the alternative that is slowing down enough to verify, has become culturally inconvenient. This, moreover, is not merely ignorance, but something more troubling: the neglect of the human reality behind the content. What is being manufactured for virality concerns a real war, where people are injured, displaced, and traumatised. The tragedy is therefore not only that falsehood is being mistaken for truth, but that human suffering itself has become something to be packaged, circulated, then consumed.
Will Humanity Reclaim Its Senses?
Artificial intelligence itself is not the villain of this writing; a tool does not choose how it is used, although it can also malfunction. The deeper concern lies in what its misuse reveals about the user: a species so eager to outsource its judgment that it now romanticises the very ignorance it once fought to overcome. Common sense, as argued earlier, must flow like water, adapting without losing its essential shape. What the events of the Iran war, and countless smaller episodes on social media, show is a common sense that has stopped flowing altogether, choosing instead to freeze around whatever version of reality is most novel, most immediate, or most emotionally satisfying. Whether humanity can still reclaim this sense, before chaotic discretion permanently replaces genuine judgment, remains an open question. But the first step, ironically, may be the oldest and least technological one. There is to pause, and to think.