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Side-blotched lizards ( 侧斑蜥蜴) have a colourful set of mating strategies. Some males, with orange throats, are large and fight their way to a group of mates. Others, with blue throats, are a bit smaller and bond with just a single female. And then there is a third type. These lizards, which have yellow throats, look very similar to females. In a rock-paper-scissors-type mating strategy, the big orange ones can chase off the medium blue ones, who, in turn, can keep a close eye on their single mate. The yellow ones, however, sometimes sneak into ( 溜进) the big males' group of mates.

The lizards face a trade-off between abundance and the cost of confirmation. It is a trade-off that is increasingly of concern to humans, too. The cost of producing text, video or audio has declined; doing so now means just a few words on a chatbot rather than hours of effort. As a consequence, roughly half of articles published on the internet last year were AI-generated.

How can internet users distinguish an article by a genuine but little-known news website from outright misinformation? Market participants often rely on " costly signals" to make such choices. An employer looking for a new hire, say, may seek applicants with a degree that took effort and a certain amount of skill, which indicates they might bring the same qualities to their work. The certificate allows employers to distinguish between good and bad applicants-creating what economists call a " separating equilibrium " and enabling transactions between willing participants.

During an earlier information age, newspaper branding provided a costly signal. In what was, in game-theoretic terms, a " reputation game" newspapers would, issue by issue, reveal exactly how focused on the truth they were. Repeated interactions with a reader, when they were deciding which paper to purchase, constituted a separating equilibrium. Content farms, websites that copied reputable news pages but with made-up stories, however, can " sneak into" these brands like the yellow lizards.

Thus the " separating equilibrium" is devolving into a " pooling equilibrium" , in which there is no way of telling between one type of creation and another. The problem with a " pooling equilibrium " , as George Akerlof put it in a Nobel-prizewinning paper, is that " Dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market. " Without a way to tell good from bad, buyers treat everything as bad.

Among side-blotched lizards, the rock-paper-scissors nature of the lizards' mating strategies means that if any of the colours becomes too common, one of the other types receives an advantage. Optimistically, then, an outpouring in the productivity of misinformation generators may provide a similar advantage to the journalistic equivalent of the blue-throated lizards-publications that jealously guard their reputation for truth-telling.