AI, Internet, and Rapid Advances in the Technology of Fraud

In 1940, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published a story describing a 300-year conspiracy to overwrite world history with a counterfeit version. The plot discusses the time, expense, and intellectual firepower required to produce and disseminate fraudulent materials. In 2026, artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet make the processes Borges described fast, cheap, and unreliant on expert knowledge. Let’s see how.

Summarizing Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”:

• Jorge Luis Borges’s friend, Adolfo Bioy-Casares, sends him a copy of Volume XLVI of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (a plagiarized Encyclopedia Britannica knockoff). Inexplicably, the volume is four pages longer than the copy Borges owns, with those final pages surveying a Mesopotamian country, Uqbar, which Borges has never heard of.

• The entry says Uqbar’s literature centers on a fictional world—Tlön. Several years later, Borges encounters Volume XI of A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön, which includes descriptions of Tlön’s bizarre languages and philosophies. Eventually, someone finds a full 40-volume set of A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön in a Memphis library.

• Ultimately, we learn, Uqbar and Tlön were the work of a secret society, Orbis Tertius, founded in the 1600s. The conspirators aimed to invent a country (Uqbar) as a vessel for presenting all manner of philosophical twists. In the early 1900s, they broadened their goal—inventing a world.

• By 1947 (seven years into the future, for Borges’s 1940 readers), schools focused their curricula on Tlön, which was by then regarded as factual. Earth’s true history was rapidly fading from memory.

• For a 1940 story, some individual or collaborative had to write the counterfeit Uqbar entry. They had to match the Cyclopedia’s paper stock, font, graphics, and stitching well enough to fool erudite bibliophiles like Borges and Bioy-Casares. Then, countless conspirators had to write forty internally consistent volumes on Tlön.

In 2026, the task of Orbis Tertius is far easier, thanks to AI and the internet. Consider Tzdezheng:

A JOURNEY TO TZDEZHING

Imagine you are a professor whose student brings him a term paper on the Central Asian nation of Tzdezheng in the early 20th century. (Or perhaps you are editor of a history journal, and the paper comes from a research scholar.) Among the citations are the “Tzdezheng” entry from the 1900 Encyclopedia Britannica (Figure 1) and a 1915 Yale University paper (Figure 2), “Mirza Abdullan Khan II,” on the ruler of Tzdezheng mentioned in the Britannica entry.