Is Fake the New Normal?

"We live in an era where the difference between real and artificial no longer startles us. Every day, it's there buzzing behind our screens and selfies. From avatars to synthetic voices and AI-generated images, the fake has become familiar and is an accepted part of our techno diet. But the more interesting question to me isn't how these illusions are made, it's why we all so easily believe them."

"I don't think it's gullibility, but longing. We don't fall for the fake because it fools us. We fall for it because it satisfies a craving for a story that we align with. My sense is that the fake feels true because it completes, or at least expands upon the story-a story that we often hold essential to completing, well, ourselves."

"Authenticity used to hold some degree of moral weight. It meant something solid and honest. But in a digital world, authenticity is cognitively expensive because it requires a triad of components that, in today's world, are often absent. Patience, context, and doubt provide the fodder and filter to give reality its structure. Those are hard to sustain when our feeds reward fluency over friction."

Believability now functions as the prevailing criterion for accepting information, often supplanting objective truth. Digital life normalizes artificial personas, synthetic voices, and AI-generated images until they feel familiar and unremarkable. People accept fabricated content not because they are simply gullible but because such content satisfies existing longings and narratives that help complete identity. Authenticity demands patience, context, and doubt, yet those elements are weakened by feeds that reward fluency and instant affirmation. Consequently, plausible fakes become functional tools that smooth uncertainty and sustain attention by offering just enough reality to keep people engaged.

Read at Psychology Today