The Power of Veracity in a World of Noise

I don’t know if I am the only one feeling this, but I am overwhelmed by the amount of information we receive every day, sometimes every five minutes. So many times I have wondered how to catch the signal in the noise, and it feels increasingly complicated when the noise is this loud. Should I filter the information? But which information? Which newspaper is still worth reading?

So I went looking for numbers.

The flood, in figures

Over the past forty years, the amount of information has grown by roughly a factor of 100,000, while almost every signal of its quality (trust, press freedom, newsroom capacity, the share of content verified by a human) has declined.

The world’s capacity to store information went from 2.6 exabytes in 1986 to 4.6 zettabytes in 2014, a compound annual growth rate of about 30%, roughly five times faster than the world economy.

To bring it down to a human scale, and by my own rough arithmetic, in 1986 the world stored about half a gigabyte of information per person. Today we generate something like 20 terabytes per person every year. The human brain acts on roughly 10 bits of information per second, which means our personal share of a single year’s data would take about 500,000 years to process. That is longer than Homo sapiens has existed.

Put differently, everything you will consciously process in your entire life, about 2 GB, is less than a single HD movie, while the world now creates the equivalent of 3.5 million human lifetimes of thought every second.

More data, not more knowledge

To be fair, almost none of this is news or knowledge. Video accounts for about 76% of mobile traffic, and connected devices alone were projected to create 90 zettabytes of data in 2025. The growth is mostly machines and video, not verified facts.

What worries me more is what has happened to the part that is meant to inform us.

AI-generated content has flooded the supply. An analysis of Common Crawl by Graphite found that 50.3% of new web articles were primarily AI-generated by November 2024, compared with about 5% before ChatGPT, and the share has hovered around half ever since. The nuance is that 86% of top-ranking Google pages are still written by humans, so AI dominates the volume but not yet the visibility.

At the same time, fake news sites are multiplying. NewsGuard counted 49 AI content farms in May 2023, 1,121 in November 2024 and 3,749 across 16 languages by June 2026. In 2024, it estimated that the odds were better than even that a website claiming to cover local news was fake.

We have moved from information scarcity to information abundance, and the scarce resource is now verification.

Why investors love AI, and what it cannot do

I think this is why AI has become so popular in the investment community. Most of us have wished at some point that we had ten or twenty brains to process more information, and AI finally lets us process data at a speed and in quantities we have never seen before. But it also lets us process more noise, which feeds our FOMO, when what we are really looking for is the signal.

Recently I was listening to an interview with Tobi Lütke, founder and CEO of Shopify. After explaining all the ways AI has transformed his life and the lives of millions of others, he said something that stayed with me: “a machine cannot take responsibility”.

It got me thinking. If we still need people to take responsibility, how far can we trust AI, and ultimately data, as the basis for a responsible decision?

My answer would be that it depends on the quality of the data. But there is also something subjective in what we call a responsible decision, and looking at some of our current leaders, it is not always easy to know where we stand. For me, a responsible decision is a choice that promotes personal and collective well-being by weighing safety, ethics and the consequences of one’s actions.

I don’t know about you, but the more information and data become accessible, the more I doubt their quality and the extent to which I can rely on them in my decisions. Maybe that is why I believe so much in scuttlebutt. Not for the reason Philip Fisher and Warren Buffett did, when information available to the public was scarce, but for the opposite one: an overload of information that pushes me to trust only what I can see or hear for myself.  

Where the value is shifting

Which brings me back to verification. This is exactly what we do at Influidence: giving access to factual and unbiased information, the kind that is becoming increasingly rare. The more present AI becomes in our lives, the more I believe in the value of these methods, because one piece of information drawn from physical evidence is worth ten times more than an article online. Not because of the information itself, but because of the trust you can place in the veracity of the signal.

Decisions are always more powerful when you trust the source of the conclusions. And our goal has always been to empower investors who want to act responsibly.  

If you think we can help you, reach out at marie.boye@influidence.com