Artificial Intelligence has attracted a great deal of attention this summer, particularly in Europe. The introduction of new obligations under the EU AI Act on August 2 has prompted businesses, content creators, customer service teams, and technology providers to examine how they use AI and, perhaps more importantly, how transparent they are about using it.
Much of the conversation has focused on the technology itself. What can AI do? How accurate is it? Will it replace jobs? Can it be trusted? These are important questions, but they may not be the most important ones.
While reading about the new regulations recently, I found myself returning to a quote by historian and author Yuval Noah Harari:
“Information is not truth. Intelligence is not wisdom.”
The sentence is deceptively simple. It is also one of the most useful lenses through which to view the current AI debate.
Harari is best known for books such as Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and more recently Nexus. His work explores the relationship between human societies, information networks, technology, and power. Unlike many commentators who focus primarily on technological capability, Harari often directs attention back to the human beings using these tools. His central concern is not whether technology will become more powerful. It is whether human wisdom can keep pace with that power.
That concern did not begin with artificial intelligence. Harari’s work frequently examines the relationship between information and power throughout human history, reminding us that every major shift in how information is created, shared, and consumed has transformed societies in ways that were difficult to predict at the time.
Whether we like it or not, we are living through one of those moments now. We stand at a pivotal crossroads in the history of information. The printing press changed who could access knowledge and challenged centuries of established authority. Radio brought voices directly into people’s homes and reshaped politics, culture, and public discourse. Television transformed information into a visual experience, influencing not only what people knew but how they understood the world around them. The internet removed many traditional barriers to publishing and communication, creating unprecedented access to information while simultaneously overwhelming us with it.
Each of these developments fundamentally changed the way people worked, learned, communicated, and made decisions. Each expanded access to information while introducing new challenges around trust, credibility, and influence. Artificial Intelligence represents the next chapter in that story.
Unlike previous information revolutions, AI does not simply distribute information more efficiently; it can create information. It can summarise, analyse, recommend, generate, predict, and increasingly act as an intermediary between human beings and the knowledge they seek. For the first time, many people are interacting not directly with information itself, but with systems that interpret and present that information on their behalf.
When the printing press emerged, people still had to read the book. When radio arrived, listeners still interpreted what they heard. When television became commonplace, viewers still evaluated what they saw. The internet dramatically increased the volume of information available, yet users still had to search, compare, and navigate their way through it. AI introduces a new layer between the individual and the information. Increasingly, the machine does some of the searching, filtering, summarising, and organising for us. The convenience is undeniable. The responsibility to think critically, however, remains entirely our own.
Perhaps that is why Harari’s observation feels so relevant today. As information becomes easier to generate, easier to distribute, and easier to consume, the distinction between information and truth becomes more important, not less.
We are living through an age in which information has become abundant beyond anything previous generations could have imagined. Answers arrive in seconds. News spreads globally in minutes. Millions of articles, videos, opinions, and analyses compete for our attention every day. Generative AI adds another layer to this environment by making it possible to produce convincing text, images, audio, and video at a scale that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.
The temptation is to assume that more information naturally leads to better understanding. Experience, however, suggests otherwise. Anyone who has spent time on social media knows that access to information does not automatically produce clarity. In many cases it produces confusion. Facts compete with opinions. Expertise competes with confidence. Evidence competes with emotion. Repetition is often mistaken for accuracy, while popularity is frequently confused with credibility.
Truth requires something more demanding than access to information. It requires context, verification, curiosity, and a willingness to question conclusions, including our own. It often requires patience, which is perhaps the least fashionable virtue of the digital age.
This is where the second half of Harari’s observation becomes equally important, because intelligence and wisdom are often treated as though they are interchangeable when, in reality, they are not.
Intelligence is the ability to process information, recognise patterns, solve problems, and achieve objectives efficiently. By that definition, modern AI systems are remarkably intelligent. They can analyse vast quantities of data, identify relationships that humans might miss, and generate sophisticated responses in a matter of seconds. Wisdom operates in a different realm altogether. Wisdom is not concerned solely with what can be done; it asks whether something should be done. It introduces judgement, ethics, experience, empathy, and long-term thinking into the conversation. Intelligence can tell us how to achieve a goal. Wisdom helps us decide whether the goal is worth pursuing.
Human history offers countless examples of intelligent people making extraordinarily unwise decisions. The same principle applies to organisations, governments, and technologies. Intelligence without wisdom can be efficient, productive, and innovative while still leading us in entirely the wrong direction.
This is one of the reasons I remain cautious whenever people speak about AI as though it were a replacement for human judgement. AI can be an extraordinary tool. It can accelerate research, assist creativity, improve productivity, and help people access information more effectively. What it cannot do is assume responsibility for the decisions we make with that information.
The danger is not that AI will suddenly begin thinking for us. The danger is that we may stop thinking for ourselves. That risk existed long before AI arrived. Search engines did not create it. Social media did not create it. Artificial intelligence will not create it either. These technologies simply amplify habits that already exist. People who approach information critically tend to use technology as a tool. People who prefer certainty over curiosity often use technology to reinforce what they already believe.
Perhaps that is why the current discussion around AI transparency matters so much. Disclosure requirements, transparency obligations, and regulatory frameworks are important steps, but they are only part of the solution. A label informing us that content was generated by AI tells us something about its origin. It tells us very little about whether the content is accurate, fair, complete, or trustworthy.
Ultimately, no regulation can replace critical thinking, no algorithm can replace judgement, and no machine can replace wisdom. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in our daily lives, the most valuable skill may not be learning how to generate more information but learning how to evaluate it more carefully.
Harari’s observation reminds us that these are not the same thing. Information is abundant. Truth remains elusive. Intelligence can be built into machines. Wisdom remains a distinctly human responsibility.
The challenge facing us is not merely technological. It is profoundly human. As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, our responsibility to think critically, question carefully, and act wisely only increases. Information will continue to grow and intelligence will continue to evolve, yet truth and wisdom remain choices. That is why the conversation we need to have is not only about artificial intelligence. It is about intelligence, truth, and wisdom.
FrogDiva Thoughts 