By Theodore Dalrymple

For most of humanity, I surmise, a porcupine is just a porcupine. There are, in fact, between thirty and forty species—zoological taxonomy is not yet a wholly exact science.

There are two families of porcupines (I use the word “family” in its taxonomic sense), namely the Old and the New World porcupines, and their taxonomic families are not closely related. They both have spines, but this is held by zoologists to be the result of convergent evolution rather than that of a close genetic relationship. A New World porcupine is more guinea pig, genetically, than it is Old World porcupine.

I noticed that a new species of porcupine has just been discovered in the jungles of South America—Colombia, to be exact. It is two feet long, lives in trees, has a prehensile tail, eats fruit, and is of a shy and retiring disposition. The article in which I read the exciting news (exciting, that is, for porcupinologists) had a picture of the animal, the first ever taken.

My initial thought was in its way revelatory of an increasingly distrustful modern mindset: Is this creature real, or the product or creation of artificial intelligence? It surely cannot be difficult for AI to invent new species or, rather, concoct plausible pictures of such.

But why would anyone do such a thing? There is more than one possible reason.

The first thing to remember is that there are a lot of people in the world, so that it is almost impossible to think of anything that someone would not be prepared to do. There is nothing so absurd, said Cicero, but that some philosopher has not said it; the same is true of actions. I used to go to my hospital thinking that I had heard everything, but I never had. For example, I had a patient who claimed to be HIV-positive in order to attract women—successfully, for there was a subset of women who found the claim to be HIV-positive as irresistible as moths find flames.

By these standards, inventing a new species of porcupine would be a comparatively rational thing to do. An academic, or academic team, might do it in order to advance a career or institution. Discovering a new species confers a kind of immortality on zoologists, at least among other zoologists. Fakery in science was prevalent enough before AI, but now it must be more tempting than ever.

There are the kinds of people in every field who do not so much want to advance themselves as make fools of others, either publicly or in private. In their own way, they may be gifted, erudite, and even admirable; for there is something in us that rejoices when fools are made of experts, provided that we are not one of the said experts.

Eric Hebborn, for example, was a brilliant draftsman and art forger whose forgeries fooled many experts. There are probably many of his forgeries still exhibited as genuine works because those who acquired them do not want to admit that they were duped (the vanity and amour propre of curators and collectors, to say nothing of art dealers, are on the side of the forger). As with the famous forger of Vermeer’s, Han van Meegeren, his motive—apart from financial gain—might have been to take revenge on an art establishment that had failed to recognize his talent when he painted under his own steam, if I may be allowed a somewhat inelegant locution. If such a forger can demonstrate that the art establishment was so easily and frequently taken in, doubt might be cast on its negative judgment of his own original work. (I possess a rather good forgery of a drawing by Francesco Guardi, though I frankly find it astonishing, indeed incredible, expert though I am not, that anyone could, even for an instant, have mistaken Han van Meegeren’s pictures for Vermeer’s.)

Now the kind of resentment that (if I am right) art forgers feel is not likely to be confined to the sphere of art but must exist in many fields of endeavor. The world is full of people who think that their talents have not been recognized and who would therefore welcome the opportunity to be revenged on “the whole pack of you,” to quote Malvolio. And artificial intelligence is made for such people.

This, of course, has a corollary, namely a decline in the level of trust in society, and even the promotion in it of a paranoid way of thinking. It is not that the decline in trust started with AI: When I was young, it was inconceivable to me, and I think to my elders and betters, that there should be widespread fraud in the scientific literature. But with the almost exponential increase in the number of researchers, all jostling for notice, and publication almost the sole criterion of academic success, fraud and malpractice have become so widespread that one is inclined to attribute any surprising result to them. AI can only accelerate the trend, making fraud and malpractice easier to commit, more tempting to employ, and harder to detect.

Most of our knowledge has always derived from authority, of course. Unless we are historians who examine original sources, we depend for our historical knowledge on the authority of a succession of authors; and even original sources may be doubted. I believe that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, not because I can prove it from primary sources or firsthand experience (I certainly couldn’t) but because I was always told that it did and had no particular reason to doubt it. Why would anyone try to deceive me about it? But just because you can’t think of a motive for deceit doesn’t mean that it hasn’t taken place. There are people who like to deceive for its own sake—disinterested deceivers, as it were.

Trust in authority and authorities is thus essential if we are not to be prey to a debilitating, continually contentious, enervating, exhausting, useless, uncritical, and paranoid skepticism about everything. Oddly enough, habitual skeptics about everything are apt suddenly to become convinced of something, often something preposterous. The ability to create verisimilitude at will might have a paradoxical effect: We shall believe nothing that we are told until a charismatic cult leader arises, upon whose every word we shall hang, in more senses than one.

For the moment, though, I still believe that a new species of porcupine has been discovered in the jungles of Colombia.

First published in Taki’s Magazine