Today we see how reality is being distorted by artificial intelligence, but I think this distortion has existed for a long time. You could even say it has always existed.
The big media outlets have always been very good at manipulating a story: leaving out details or telling the facts from whatever angle suits them.
The problem is that the history of humanity itself is infected with this. There’s a very popular saying that goes, “history is written by the winners,” and it happens to be true. We tend to hear success stories because, in many cases, that’s what inspires and impresses us.
Whoever wins a battle, receives an award, or manages to build a successful venture ends up being the one we listen to. We want to understand how they got there because we believe we can replicate that success, as if every story were simple instructions, when we’ve already talked about how often it all comes down to luck.
Something we tend to ignore is that when someone tells their own story, they also decide what to show, what to hide, and what to exaggerate.
Sometimes they do it to make the story more interesting, but many times it’s to protect themselves or avoid unnecessary details and questions that might expose suffering, or a reality that would make their story less compelling.
In the end, a lot of details get lost, changed, or rearranged.
That’s why I say we have always lived inside a constructed reality: an edited version of events, like one of those filters you put on in Instagram or TikTok.
The big difference today is that artificial intelligence, especially in visual media, creates a much stronger stimulus for our brain. It’s not the same to read a story as to watch a few seconds of video that seems to confirm the facts just because it was “recorded.”
This captures the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” pretty well, except, even worse, a video is made up of dozens of images.
Historically, manipulating an audiovisual medium has been hard, while manipulating a narrative was fairly simple: all it took was changing the angle, choosing certain words, or leaving out context.
Today it’s not just easy to alter a narrative, you can also fabricate visual evidence to go along with it. Even though many of us can spot AI-generated content, we have to admit it’s getting harder every time. That gives lies a lot more force and pushes us to assume that, by default, anything could be untrue.
We’ve always had manipulated narratives, biased media, and incomplete stories. But today, those versions in audiovisual format generate a credibility so intense that it keeps us from questioning reality in real time.
