The End of Evidence: What Happens When AI Becomes Visually Indistinguishable from Reality?

We have passed a threshold.

Not a technological one – those pass quietly, like software updates.

But a cultural and epistemological threshold, one with far-reaching consequences:

We can no longer, reliably, tell what is real video and what is synthetic.

I say this not as a provocation, but as a sober recognition of what is already here. The videos shown below – cinematic, emotional, and uncannily plausible – were generated entirely with text prompts using Veo 3, an AI video tool. There were no actors, no cameras, no lenses, no VFX team. Just language and math.

And they look real.

🎭 Plausibility Is the New Authenticity

In a world dominated by media, realism used to be a sign of truth. “Seeing is believing,” we used to say. But realism has now been decoupled from authenticity. The hyper-real images generated by Veo, Sora, Pika, and Runway aren’t simply “fakes.” They’re synthetic performances of realism, trained on datasets of real light, real movement, and real narrative tropes. They’re optimized for plausibility – and they deliver it effortlessly.

We once categorized video according to its relation to the real:

• Fiction vs. non-fiction

• Documentary vs. dramatization