Everything’s so fake, it’s real
How AI-generated imagery is shaping our digital landscapes
A woman is walking in the desert under the beating sun. Her phone’s GPS is leading her towards an outpost, but she is quickly dehydrating. She sees a glimmer on the horizon. It looks like an oasis. It looks like water! But it’s not on the map and to reach it would mean making a detour. “Oasis or outpost?” she says to herself.
Oasis or outpost? Before we hear her answer, let’s recap the definition of a mirage:
In contrast to a hallucination, a mirage is a real optical phenomenon that can be captured on camera, since light rays are actually refracted to form the false image at the observer’s location. What the image appears to represent, however, is determined by the interpretive faculties of the human mind. (Wikipedia)
There are three things I want to pick up on here:
1. A mirage is a real optical phenomenon that produces a false image.
2. We know it’s a real phenomenon, because we can photograph it.
3. Even though the image is false, we make it seem real by projecting onto it what we want to see.
This could (almost) pass for a description of our social web today. The mirage stands in for AI-generated imagery; the…
