Disillusioned by Pixels: How AI Deepfakes Might Return Us to Reality
We have always had “deepfakes.” They were just expensive, centralized, and controlled by rulers, corporations, and institutions. Generative AI is changing that by making the tools of deceit available to nearly everyone. Paradoxically, this democratization may be one of the best things to happen to our relationship with media—because when more people can create convincing illusions, more people learn to see through them.
A casual comment on a video post sparked this reflection. The scene looked staged — another prank or influencer stunt. Rather than outrage, the reply carried quiet optimism: perhaps the flood of AI-generated content and hyper-manipulable media is forcing a healthy disillusionment with mediated reality itself.
The “Torches of Freedom” Precedent
In 1929, Edward Bernays orchestrated a masterclass in pre-AI manipulation. Hired by the American Tobacco Company, he staged young women lighting cigarettes during New York’s Easter Sunday Parade, framing them as “torches of freedom” tied to women’s liberation. Photographers were tipped off, the story was planted, and it spread across newspapers, successfully shifting cultural norms. No AI required — just money, connections, psychology, and gatekept media.
Similar tactics shaped wars, consumer habits, and public opinion for decades. The machinery of deception was real; it was simply not visible to most, nor easily countered by ordinary people.
Democratization Makes the Machinery Visible
AI doesn’t invent lying — it democratizes the toolkit. What once required PR firms, newspaper allies, and big budgets can now be done by pranksters, creators, activists, or random individuals with a prompt. This levels the playing field. The heavy promotion of “deepfake panic” in legacy outlets often carries a defensive subtext: Only certified authorities should be trusted to verify reality.
But when the tools spread, the illusions become easier to spot. Being able to generate fakes helps people recognize fakes. The folly of centralized narrative control grows more obvious. We move from naive trust (“seeing is believing”) toward calibrated skepticism.
Anyone who has been close to a headline news story knows how distorted coverage usually is — facts mangled, context stripped, narratives pre-fitted. AI simply accelerates and exposes this pattern. The arms race of detection tools feels futile. A better path is epistemic humility: admitting how little we can truly know about distant events from screens alone.
As one thinker put it:
“Naturally, we all seek to explain what we perceive in terms of the phase we have been in rather than in terms of the phase we are moving towards. We are like water molecules trying to understand the process of boiling and evaporation in the absence of any concept of being in a gaseous (vapour) state.”
We are in the middle of such a phase shift. Old assumptions about media authority are evaporating. What replaces them?
Toward the Other Side
The healthiest outcome is not perfect technological verification or renewed central control. It is a re-discovery of the real world after disillusionment.
Treat most mediated content as entertainment, provocation, or partial signal rather than authoritative truth. Prioritize direct experience, local reputation, logic, and primary sources. Ask the Wendell Berry question:
“Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible… The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, ‘What will this do to our community?’ tends toward the right answer for the world.”
This leads to practical shifts:
- More offline time and genuine community involvement.
- Comfort with saying “I don’t know” about most distant controversies.
- Communication rooted first in local relationships, with wider conversations treated as secondary.
- A light-hearted cultural habit of laughing at power-hungry control freaks — remembering how close they came to total narrative dominance, and how democratized tools helped prevent it.
This won’t happen automatically. Some will demand more censorship or retreat into echo chambers. But the visibility of folly — staged pranks, obvious contradictions, endless viral noise — creates an opening. The fire of media technology has always enabled both warmth and arson. Now more of us can see the flames clearly and choose how to use (or avoid) them.
Disillusionment is not despair. It is a clarifying process. On the other side lies the possibility of saner, more grounded lives: less glued to distant spectacle, more invested in the places and people we can actually touch and know. A world where reality — stubborn, local, and human — regains its proper weight.
That feels like genuine progress.