Pranksters? No, the danger is the people with power meddling with information. They start wars, not pranksters. But there's nothing that can be done about that so it's pointless talking about it.
> The scientific-historical record of accumulating human knowledge has grown steadily for ten thousand years. Yes some information gets lost, some gets proven wrong, some is disputed, and some gets hidden when winners spin the facts to flatter themselves.
"Scientific-historical"? Almost all historical information ( written record ) is lost. Less than 1% of all written text from ancient greece and rome survived. Also it's not a matter of the winners hiding facts that's the issue, it's the winners pushing particular "facts". Take the civil war. It was a war where one side had slave states and the other side was the confederacy. Yet we are told that it was a war to end slavery. Have fun squaring that circle.
> But despite the system’s flaws, until now it’s worked fairly well to maintain our shared understanding about what’s real and what’s true.
Our understanding of what's real and true is solely a function of who is in power. Same as it always has been and always will be.
It doesn't matter whether the tool is spoken language, written language, printing press, radio, tv, social media or AI. Knowledge "pollution" is what societies and nations breath to survive. The only struggle is the fight over who gets to pollute.