During one of my daily doom-scrolls on TikTok, I caught myself doing something embarrassing: the good old Facebook mom trick of pinching and zooming on a photo. Except this time, it wasn’t a blurry casserole recipe or a baby photo I was squinting at. It was a Polaroid-style shot of a celebrity with what looked like a random fan. After staring at it for far too long, I realized it wasn’t real. It was generated by artificial intelligence.
Credit: IG @ lilmiquela
This wasn’t just a one-off scroll fail. My social media feeds (and I’m assuming yours too) are now overflowing with artificially created images – selfies with celebrities, hard launches of relationships that don’t exist, fake candid photos – so convincing they’re nearly impossible to distinguish from reality. The scary part isn’t only that we’re being fooled in the moment.
It’s that we’re living through a complete shift in how the internet and social media operate.
Some call it the Dead Internet Theory. This theory is that the content we view online isn’t created by people anymore, but by bots, curated algorithms and now AI. And what looks like thousands of people interacting with such a post might just be fake AI bots made to give the impression of a thriving online community. Whether you buy into this theory or not, the unease of it rings true: the human element of the internet feels like it’s shrinking.
Back in 2016, a mere nine years ago, I remembered being so enthralled by the rise of Lil Miquela, a virtual influencer who wasn’t real but felt real enough to trick people – myself included. Miquela was created by software company Brud Inc.
Miquela looked like any other teenager – posting Instagram selfies, working with brands and even beefing with other influencers. She was even named one of the “Most Influential People on the Internet” by TIME Magazine in 2018.
At the time, she felt like a novelty, almost futuristic. Now, in 2025, as AI gets smarter, she feels more like a warning.
What once seemed like a quirky experiment has become our standard: feeds saturated with digital personas, AI images and fabricated moments that blur reality more seamlessly than Lil Miquela ever could.
This shift reveals something bigger. The rise of AI personas and synthetic images isn’t just a cool trick – it points to how far social media has drifted from its original purpose. These platforms were supposed to connect us, give access to people and perspectives we couldn’t reach before. But, sad to say, the emphasis has changed.
Connection is no longer the priority; attention is. It doesn’t matter if what you’re looking at is real, as long as you’re looking.
My For You Page on TikTok has become somewhat of a case study in this change. It’s filled with Polaroid-style pictures of relationships that never happened and celebrities with fans from events that never took place. These images look so authentic that I find myself zooming in like a detective searching for AI mishaps.
To be fair, people have always photoshopped images online. Facetune disasters, Photoshop bloopers and over-edited selfies are practically internet traditions. I’ll even admit it: I’ve made a couple of clumsy edits of myself in a selfie with Harry Styles. I’ve also played with AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT, curious to see what kind of photos I could cook up.
But the stark difference now is the quality of these photos. AI-generated images are no longer just passable – they’re nearly perfect. A warped hand, a wonky ear or a logo filled with gibberish used to give it away. Today, the photos are polished enough to pass as real. That huge jump matters because it makes misinformation harder to spot if you’re not careful, and scams seem to be looming over our heads.
Think about it: We joke about our parents getting duped by Facebook chain posts or sketchy emails. But what happens when we’re the ones aging into a future where our feeds are flooded with flawless fake images? Picture 60-year-old us, clicking on a post that looks like a real friend asking for money, or forwarding a picture of a celebrity endorsement that never existed. The same tools entertaining us now could be the reason we’re getting scammed later. Honestly, it’s kind of funny in a dark way — we’ve spent years clowning older generations for falling for bad Photoshop, and now AI is setting us up to be the punchline.
Credit: Creative Commons
Still, the humor wears off quickly. The rise of undetectable fake pictures undermines the very point of social media. If platforms were designed to connect us to real people, what happens when most of what we see never existed at all? The internet starts to feel less like a conversation and more like a simulation.
Maybe this is the fate of our generation: to live in a digital landscape where reality and fabrication blur until we can’t tell the difference. Or maybe it’s a warning. If we want to keep the connective power of social media alive, we’ll need to push for transparency, teach media literacy and maybe even rethink our obsession with virality.
Until then, I’ll keep zooming in on TikToks like a suspicious Facebook mom — because in 2025, trusting what you see online feels less like common sense and more like a gamble.