Real vs. Fake
Whenever I see the latest trend of AI-generated profile pictures, I get a strange feeling. Without ever stepping foot in a studio, a polished final product is churned out in seconds. It’s not just surprisingly better looking than the real person—it’s also cheap and effortless.
In a world where the final result is handed to us for free, what exactly is left?
This thought reminds me of a photograph I took in London years ago. Standing in front of the Notting Hill Bookshop at Portobello Market. [1] If we were judging purely on visual beauty, an AI-generated landscape might look far better.
Walter Benjamin once argued that as identical reproductions become increasingly common, the unique presence—the "aura"—of the true original is lost. But he was wrong. [2]
The aura of the image itself as a final product has been completely shattered by the advent of AI. However, that aura hasn't vanished; it merely relocated. It shifted from the final output to the process of how that output was created. In fact, you could say it has become even more precious because of it.
Even if millions of high-resolution images of that London bookshop float around the internet, they cannot compare to the value of my single old photograph. The damp smell after the rain, the heavy thud of the bell ringing as you open the door, the creaking of the worn wooden floorboards—these sensory details and memories cannot be replicated by a "plausibly generated image." The fact that I physically boarded a plane and stood at that exact time, in that exact place, is an irreplaceable reality.
We are drowning in end products devoid of any process. Anyone can acquire beautiful, flawless results in an instant. But as the aura of the final product converges to zero, people will willingly endure the effort and cost to seek out authentic, lived experiences. [3] The more common digital imitation becomes, the more the process behind the product (like the very moment you pressed the shutter) gains an irreplaceable scarcity.
We can extend this thought even further—specifically, regarding physical spaces. It’s obvious that these trends will completely upend the role of offline spaces. If spaces in the past were merely storefronts for distributing goods, spaces in the coming era will become the sole physical proof that a bodily experience actually took place.
In a world where everything is digitally cloned, the experiences we physically live through and the physical spaces where they happen will become the ultimate luxury. Experience and space—these two things will become the most expensive luxuries in the impending AI era.
[1] A storefront that no longer exists today.
[2] Walter Benjamin, 1935, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit)
[3] This ties directly into the "realness premium" phenomenon that the business world has recently been focusing on.