Although today we talk a lot about reality distorted by artificial intelligence, I think that distortion has existed for many years. You could say that, in some way, it has always existed.
The media has always had the ability to manipulate a story, omit details, or tell the facts from a specific point of view. Even history itself is usually shaped by that. There’s a well-known saying that goes “history is written by the victors,” and even if it sounds like a cliché, it holds some truth.
Whoever wins a battle, receives an award, or manages to build a successful venture ends up being heard. Not just because they did something important, but because many people want to understand how they got there and, in some way, replicate that success.
But 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. Other times, to protect themselves. And many times, because that version benefits them more. In the end, many details get lost, modified, or rearranged.
In that sense, we could say that we have always lived within a partially constructed reality. Not necessarily an absolute lie, but an edited version of events.
The difference now is that artificial intelligence, especially when it enters the visual realm, creates a much stronger stimulus for the brain. Reading an incredible story is not the same as watching a ten-second video where something apparently impossible happens right before your eyes. In that moment, your brain tries to process the image and the reaction is almost immediate: “What just happened?”
That’s where the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words comes in. For a long time, manipulating the narrative was relatively easy: changing the angle of a news story, choosing certain words, omitting context, or presenting only part of the story. But convincingly manipulating the audiovisual medium was much harder.
Today you can’t just alter the narrative. You can also fabricate the visual evidence that accompanies it. And that gives the lie a much greater force, because we no longer just read it: we also see it.
The problem is that we have always had manipulated narratives, biased media, and incomplete stories. The difference is that now those versions can arrive in audiovisual format, with an intensity that is much harder to question in real time.
