Steve Rosenbaum

Activist, Blogger, Brainstormer, Business adviser, Change agent, Concerned citizen, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Filmmaker, Global soul, Idea generator, Inventor, Journalist, Producer, Social entrepreneur, Startup, Technologist, Writer/Editor

Steven Rosenbaum is the author of The Future of Truth, a book that asks a simple question with uncomfortable implications: what happens when machines begin to decide what is true? In it, he explores why truth matters now more than ever, and how technologies that present themselves as objective—artificial intelligence, algorithmic feeds, automated systems—are quietly taking hold of the mechanisms that shape belief. The risk is not just misinformation. It is something deeper: the replacement of human complexity, judgment, and debate with a kind of robotic certainty that feels authoritative, but may be fundamentally unaccountable. Rosenbaum comes to this work not as a theorist, but as someone who has spent his career inside the systems that now define the information ecosystem. As Co-founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Media Center, he is working with a new generation of leaders to confront these challenges directly. At the center of that work is a focus on Gen Z—not as a demographic, but as the first generation to grow up fully inside algorithmic systems, and the first to understand, intuitively, both their power and their risks. At the Sustainable Media Center, Rosenbaum brings together Gen Z creators, technologists, policymakers, and media leaders to rethink the design and incentives of social platforms. The work is practical and urgent: how do we build systems that reward accuracy instead of outrage? How do we shift power away from engagement at all costs and toward accountability? And how do we create space for human judgment in a world increasingly shaped by machine-generated answers? This work sits at the intersection of media, technology, and civic life. It draws on a long career spent exploring how information is created, distributed, and trusted. Rosenbaum has founded five companies across media and technology, and has consistently worked at moments when new tools reshape how stories are told and who gets to tell them. Earlier in his career, he created MTV Unfiltered, an early user-generated video project that anticipated the participatory media landscape that would later be scaled by platforms like YouTube and TikTok. That throughline—from early experiments in user-generated content to today’s questions about AI and truth—is not accidental. Rosenbaum has long been interested in what happens when the barriers to creation fall away. What begins as democratization can, without guardrails, become distortion. What begins as participation can become manipulation. And what begins as connection can, over time, erode trust. In The Future of Truth, he argues that we are now at a turning point. The systems that once helped distribute information are increasingly shaping it, filtering it, and in some cases generating it. The line between human and machine authorship is blurring. Evidence can be manufactured. Authority can be simulated. And the speed and scale of these systems make traditional forms of verification feel slow and fragile by comparison. And yet, Rosenbaum does not see this moment as purely dystopian. He believes it is also an opportunity. The same generation that has been most affected by these systems is also the one most capable of reimagining them. Gen Z is not simply consuming media differently; they are questioning its assumptions, challenging its incentives, and beginning to build alternatives. Through his work at the Sustainable Media Center, Rosenbaum is helping to support that shift. The goal is not just critique, but construction. Not just identifying what is broken, but working, alongside young leaders, to design systems that are healthier, more transparent, and more aligned with human values. He believes we are entering a period where truth will not be something we can take for granted. It will need to be actively built, defended, and sustained. And the choices being made now—by technologists, by policymakers, and by the next generation of creators—will determine whether the future of truth is something we shape, or something that is shaped for us.

Truth.

Truth is no longer philosophical. It’s social infrastructure.

Academics, AI and Facts, AI and Lies, Artificial Truth, Curation, Digital media, Facts vs. Fictions, Fake News, filmmaking, Journalism, Media, Media Education, NYC Entrepreneurism, NYC Media, NYC Startup Culture, NYC Startups, Publishing, Social Video, Synthetic Truth, truth, Video

My first TED (thanks to an invite from Chris) was TED Global in Oxford in 2005. Today TED has grown to be my most important intellectual and emotional family. I set out to write a book about Truth, and the first pages were drafted on a plane flying to Vancouver. The books first chapter, and the last are both set at TED... you can read a chapter summary here: https://a.co/d/0aUlVFsk or order the audio book. It's a Truth story and a TED story. As it should be.

Building INTERGENERATIONAL Communities