Over the past few days, my LinkedIn feed has been full of AI-generated images. Some delightful, others disturbing. Among the disturbing ones: a fake car crash that never happened. A perfectly normal-looking receipt, completely fabricated. A tearful message from a loved one that doesn’t exist.
None of it was real. All of it looked real enough.
Remember the line I mentioned in this post about a year ago? We have crossed it. Not with fanfare. Not with headlines. Just quietly, imperceptibly. And suddenly, we are in a world where what we see, hear, and read can no longer be trusted by default.
There is no need for science fiction metaphors anymore. The simulation is already part of our daily lives. An image, a voice message, a short video. Any of them could be real. Or not. And the worst part is that most of the time, we cannot really tell the difference.
Yes, there are tools to verify content. Deepfake detection. Reverse image search. Watermarking systems are on the way. But most people will not stop to investigate. Not out of laziness. But out of fatigue. We are all too busy trying to keep up.
This is not just about misinformation. It is about erosion. Erosion of trust, of perception, of our shared understanding of what is real.
Generative AI is never entirely harmless.
Accelerating your inbox is one thing.
Enabling autonomous drones or coordinating large-scale fraud is a different kind of power. And it demands a different kind of responsibility.
In the past few weeks, I have spoken with lawyers and CEOs who received calls from people they trusted. The voice on the other end sounded exactly like their assistant, their colleague, or their spouse. Only later did they find out it was not them. The message had been generated. The voice had been cloned. And the trust had been broken.
Some described the experience as surreal. Others called it terrifying. Most of them were left with one unsettling question: how are we supposed to know what is real?
I had a similar thought. And I acted on it. I called my parents. I told them that from now on, if they ever receive a message from me that sounds strange or rushed or just slightly off, they should ask for the code. We have one. Nothing elaborate. Just a quiet agreement between us, something simple and human to anchor us in the middle of the noise.
Because that is what this is really about. In a world flooded with synthetic certainty, small signals of authenticity become more valuable than ever. A shared word. A pause. A memory that only the real person would know.
This is not paranoia. It is preparation. We are not going back to the world as it was. These tools are here to stay. And they are powerful. What we choose to do with them, how we decide to respond, will shape more than just our workflows. It will shape our relationships. Our institutions. Our sense of reality.
There is no panic in this post. Only awareness.
Welcome to the Matrix. Stay awake.
