We built 7 startups, a 9th pan-India podcast on Spotify in 2022 & a Global Top 10 Personal Branding & PR Agency in 2024 & 'publicly' built 1-10,000 YouTube subscribers in 95 days. So if you want to grow your personal brand without guessing what works, join the 250,000+ community!
On New Year’s Eve, thousands of people gathered at Brooklyn Bridge Park, shivering in freezing temperatures, eyes locked on the skyline. They had seen the videos on social media. They had read the hype. They counted down to midnight, ready for a spectacular light show.
And then?
Darkness. Silence. Not a single spark. The crowd had been duped.
Naturally, within minutes, the internet found its villain: Artificial Intelligence. A viral Reddit post immediately took off, claiming that ChatGPT had hallucinated the event and recommended it to hapless tourists. The narrative was perfect - dumb AI leads humans off a cliff. It racked up thousands of upvotes because it confirmed what we all secretly suspect: the bots are breaking reality.
BUT...
ChatGPT wasn’t the architect of this failure. The real culprits were human beings, specifically content creators on TikTok and Instagram. Influencers had been recycling footage from previous Fourth of July celebrations - when the Brooklyn Bridge does actually have fireworks - and tagging it as “NYE 2026 Preview.”
The algorithms certainly amplified these videos, but they didn’t create the lie. Humans did. For clicks. And the irony is palpable:
To prove that AI spreads misinformation, we confidently spread misinformation about AI.
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The Bottom Line
We are living through a transition period where it is comforting to externalize our confusion onto AI. But as builders and leaders, we can’t afford the luxury of lazy narratives. The Brooklyn Bridge fiasco proves that human clickbait is still plenty capable of fooling us without any help from AI. Before we condemn the code, we should probably verify the source.
I'd closed $75+ Mn in B2B enterprise deals in 14 years before embarking on my entrepreneurship journey & now running a Top 10 Global PR agency. This is the pattern I've spotted repeatedly when it comes to the "marketing cycle" in B2B & B2C:
This is what you need to do for 2026 to make it a truly successful one. We've been doing for 2024, 2025 & again this year. And have got unimaginable results. Time you should follow suit.
We built 7 startups, a 9th pan-India podcast on Spotify in 2022 & a Global Top 10 Personal Branding & PR Agency in 2024 & 'publicly' built 1-10,000 YouTube subscribers in 95 days. So if you want to grow your personal brand without guessing what works, join the 250,000+ community!
