Everything is Default Fake

What Happens When All Images Are Generated (from Jan 2024)

How media will change in 2024

Media serves not just as a conduit for messages but as an arbiter of reality itself. Friederich Kittler, the German media theorist, said it best, “Media defines what really is”. These days, the equation is straightforward: if something cannot be verified via Google or substantiated by media outlets, its very existence is questioned.

This wasn’t always the case. Our trust has shifted from the empirical to the representational; reality is increasingly defined by our ability to depict it.

As we introduce media forms with higher fidelity—written accounts, images, videos—we not only come to expect them but to equate them with reality itself.

Media by Order of Fidelity

1. Video

2. Images

3. Audio recording

4. Written account

5. First-hand account

6. Second-hand account

7. Hearsay

What happens to our trust in media when our capacity to generate it artificially improves to the point where we can produce indistinguishable fakes?

This creates a wave of “Skepticism,” leading to what I term “False Positive Reality.” In this state, our pervasive skepticism makes us doubt even the real labeling it as artificial, simulated, fake—reality becomes another casualty in the endless war between the real and the represented.

Like the doctor misdiagnosing the disease, we believe the real is infected with the fake.

Adjacent to the notion of the hyperreal (the blurring of the boundary between the simulated and the real), this new skepticism leads us not only to be skeptical about things that are really fake, but also leads us to believe that things that are real are fake.

We were accustomed, in the age of photoshop, to false negatives, fakes perceived as real.

Duped only by skilled technicians, our base assumption was that most images on average were real, in the age of AI-generation, that assumption no longer holds.

EVERYTHING IS DEFAULT FAKE NOW.

*updated* Media by Order of Fidelity

1. Video

2. Images

3. Audio recording

4. Written account

1. First-hand account

2. Second-hand account

3. Hearsay

In a great reversal, older modes of media will make a resurgence in our assessments of reality. If high-fidelity media can be faked, then the “new” weapon against falsehood will be an almost anachronistic return to the “eyewitness,” to the account of the “mutual”, supported by interpersonal relationships rather than mediated ones.

The only way to fight against the attacks on reality is to decidedly share it.

Consequently, this heightens the value of presence, devalues videos and pictures because they can be falsified, and thus increases the value of eye-witness accounts when they come from friends, neighbors, people close to us. You’re going to trust your friend or your friend’s friend who said “I saw this” versus the “New York Times” or an anon online.

Most Americans are losing their trust in mass media, as reported by Gallup in 2023.

Trust becomes localized, the networks of information sharing become smaller to increase trust. after a few degrees of separation, media and information starts to be doubted.

If presence and eyewitnesses are highly valued, and videos and pictures are devalued, What kind of society does that create?

A society in which visual media is devalued in favor of shared physical presence is one where we turn into HYPER-LOCAL / GLOBAL SKEPTICISM.