Truthiness



Truthiness is a term coined by Stephen Colbert on his Comedy Central fake news show, The Colbert Report.

It refers to a quality that statements can have where they "seem true", or "should be true", or "would (give good story / support my agenda / impress people) if they were true" … without any actual worry over whether they would be judged to be "actually" true by skeptical and disinterested observers.

Stephen uses his gut rather than his head to determine the truthiness of a given statement.

Technology
Independently of Colbert's neologism (and possibly predating it), programmers sometimes use "truthy" to refer to data that is somehow akin to a boolean "true" value.

However, there's also been discussion of Colbertian truthiness in relation to technology hype cycles, in which, repeatedly, truthy visions of new technologies and their dreamed-of capabilities flood the media and the imagination of the general public only for it all to fizzle out afterwards. Examples in the early 2020s include cryptocurrency, blockchain, and NFT hype – followed a little later by large language model AI hype, a bubble which has yet to burst as of mid-2023.