By Elke Porter | WBN News Vancouver | February 9, 2026
Subscription to WBN and being a Writer is FREE!

Welcome to the post-truth era, where reality has more versions than a software update and facts come with confidence intervals. Since AI crashed our party, we've had to expand our vocabulary beyond the quaint binary of "true" and "false." We now live in a world where chatbots hallucinate with the conviction of prophets, deepfakes look more real than reality, and your search results are personally curated to match your biases. Truth isn't dead—it's just been through a neural network and emerged with fifty shades of maybe. So buckle up as we catalog the beautiful, terrifying spectrum of veracity we've invented since we taught machines to talk.

25 Shades of Truth

  1. Technically True - Correct on the narrowest possible interpretation while misleading overall
  2. Approximately True - Close enough for government work, as they say
  3. Statistically True - True on average, even if no individual case matches
  4. Algorithmically True - What the AI's training data suggests, regardless of reality
  5. Consensus True - Becomes true because enough people believe it
  6. Formerly True - Was accurate until five minutes ago when the update dropped
  7. Regionally True - Depends entirely on your GPS coordinates
  8. Contextually True - True if you squint and ignore everything else
  9. Emotionally True - Feels right, and isn't that what matters?
  10. Probabilistically True - Has a 73.4% chance of being accurate
  11. Synthetically True - Generated content that happens to align with reality
  12. Plausibly True - Could be true, sounds true, might be true
  13. Aspirationally True - Will be true once we manifest it
  14. Commercially True - True according to the sponsored content
  15. Curated True - True after selective editing and favorable lighting
  16. Crowdsourced True - Wikipedia says so (citation needed)
  17. Partially True - The first half checks out; we don't talk about the second half
  18. Optimistically True - True if everything goes according to plan
  19. Nostalgically True - Accurate to how we remember it, not how it was
  20. Quantumly True - Both true and false until someone fact-checks it
  21. Biometrically True - Your face says it's true, who are we to argue?
  22. Blockchain True - Immutably recorded, therefore unquestionably real
  23. Engagement True - Generates clicks, so it must contain some truth
  24. Pre-bunked True - True because we debunked the debunking
  25. Confidently True - Stated with such certainty that doubt seems rude

25 Shades of Lies

  1. Hallucinated - The AI made it up with complete conviction
  2. Synthetic Lie - Deepfaked into seeming reality
  3. Optimized Lie - A/B tested for maximum believability
  4. Algorithmically Amplified - A small untruth scaled to viral proportions
  5. Prompt-Injected - The lie someone told the AI to tell you
  6. Contextually Collapsed - True things rearranged into falsehood
  7. Selectively Cropped - The lie of omission, now automated
  8. Sentiment-Analyzed Lie - Calibrated to your emotional vulnerabilities
  9. Predictively False - The autocomplete led us astray
  10. Recommendationally Untrue - The algorithm thought you'd prefer the lie
  11. Personalized Fiction - A custom untruth, just for you
  12. Aggregated Falsehood - Many small errors compiled into one big lie
  13. Training Data Lie - Baked into the foundation model
  14. Confidently Incorrect - Wrong with the certainty of a thousand neural networks
  15. Outdated by Design - True when the model was trained, false ever since
  16. Statistically Improbable - So unlikely it's essentially a lie
  17. Consensus Illusion - Everyone in the echo chamber agrees it's true
  18. Adversarially Crafted - Designed specifically to fool the detector
  19. Multimodally Mendacious - Lies that work across text, image, and audio
  20. Gamified Untruth - Points awarded for spreading it
  21. Watermarked Fiction - Contains invisible markers proving it's fake (that nobody checks)
  22. Synthetically Aged - New lies presented as historical fact
  23. Biased by Default - The lie built into the baseline model
  24. Plausible Deniability - Can't prove it's false, so it persists
  25. Auto-Generated Mythology - Lies that spawn more lies in an endless loop

Conclusion

So there you have it: our brave new taxonomy of truth and lies in the age of artificial intelligence. We've moved from a world of simple facts and falsehoods into something far more nuanced, far more slippery, and honestly, far more exhausting. The question is no longer "Is this true?" but rather "Which flavour of truth are we dealing with today?"

Now for the uncomfortable part: your homework.

Go back and read your three most recent blog posts, social media threads, or newsletters. Be honest with yourself—which shades from our list are you guilty of deploying? Are you skating by on "Technically True" while misleading your readers? Relying a bit too heavily on "Emotionally True" to make your point? Or perhaps you've accidentally committed some "Algorithmically Amplified" sins by sharing that thing you didn't quite fact-check?

The truth is (and yes, I'm being aspirationally sincere here), we're all complicit in this fifty-shaded mess. The first step to navigating our AI-augmented reality is recognizing which parts of the spectrum we're operating in—and deciding whether that's really where we want to be.

Drop a comment with your most embarrassing shade. I'll start: I'm definitely guilty of "Confidently True" on at least a dozen occasions. Your turn.

Elke Porter at:
Westcoast German Media
LinkedIn: Elke Porter or
WhatsApp:  +1 604 828 8788.
Public Relations. Communications. Education

Let’s bring your story to life — contact me for books, articles, blogs, and bold public relations ideas that make an impact.

TAGS: #AI Truth #Post Truth Era #Digital Deception #AI Ethics #Truth In The Age Of AI #Fifty Shades Of Facts #WBN News Vancouver #WBN Ai #Elke Porter

Share this article
The link has been copied!