Is artificial intelligence fuelling natural stupidity?

In 2012, there was an air of innocence when I took over as the Readers' Editor of this newspaper. Terms such as'accuracy', 'fairness', 'authentic sources', and'verification', and C.P. Scott's dictum "Comment is free, but facts are sacred" did possess a striking potential to keep journalism on the straight and narrow path. Algorithm was a part of mathematics and technology and it had hardly revealed its stranglehold on the information ecology. Artificial intelligence was a footnote. Albert Einstein's wry remark, "Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity," was invoked sometimes to prove a point.