"But as real celebrities and influencers try to be perceived as more 'authentic,' many A.I. influencers like Miquela and Mia Zelu are leaning into their unrealness..."

"... proudly claiming their robot monikers in their bios and having no shame about posting in Hong Kong at 3 p.m. and in New York an hour later. In fact, the teams behind them feel the lack of a corporeal form may be their best selling point. 'From a brand perspective, we are able to create a very dynamic story line,' Ms. Kahn said. 'So Miquela can be, for example, in London one day supporting an art gallery opening, and in L.A. the same day to support a new coffee shop that she really likes, right? I think brands love that she can be anywhere... I think the next generation isn’t really thinking as much about is this person real or not?... It’s more about: 'What does this account stand for?'"

I'm reading "They’re Famous. They’re Everywhere. And They’re Fake. Influencers like Lil’ Miquela and Mia Zelu have millions of followers and generate serious income, despite being created with artificial intelligence" (NYT).

1. Who's "Ms. Kahn"? Who cares?

2. I like how they put "authentic" in quotes.

3. What's the difference between A.I. "influencers" like Miquela and old-time ad mascots like Tony the Tiger and the Trix rabbit?

4. You know who else can be in Hong Kong and then in New York an hour later? Santa Claus. Kids have accepted his dictates as long as I can remember. At least Miquela isn't demanding that we be "good" and threatening us with a list. Or is it only a matter of time?

5. Here is what reality must compete with:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Miquela (@lilmiquela)

6. Maybe she and her ilk are saving us all from the trouble of striving to excel at fakeness. We're free at last. Now, what?

7. What if the people you met in real life were like Miquela, putting their plastic cup on their head and affecting an expression of inane ecstasy? And maybe they already are... and have been for a long time. I went running to find this passage from "My Dinner With André," a movie that came out more than 40 years ago:

... I turned the television on, and there was this guy who had just won the something something, you know, some sports event, some kind of a great big check and some kind of huge silver bottle, and he, you know, you know, he couldn’t stuff the check in the bottle, and he put the bottle in front of his nose and pretended it was his face, you know, he wasn’t really listening to the guy who was interviewing him, but he was smiling, huh, malevolently at his friends, and I looked at that guy and I thought “What a horrible, empty, manipulative rat.” Then I thought, “That guy is me.”

8. Writing #7 — "What if the people you met" — made me think of an old song that I gradually realized was "Who Are the Brain Police?"

Even as a composite? Might it not be fake, but accurate? Performative authenticity?

Oh... MY... GOD...

So Chuck Schumer has spent his entire career telling a story about a Long Island couple...

The only thing is... THEY DONT EXIST!!!! THEY ARENT REAL pic.twitter.com/dgmWLKvqwC

— kevin smith (@kevin_smith45) August 12, 2025

It's hard to think of other examples of a politician creating characters with actual names to spice up the rhetoric. I thought of John Edwards's little girl without a coat — "a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm" — but she didn't have a name. There was the name Julia, in Barack Obama's "Life of Julia," but she wasn't presented as a real person, just a cartoon everywoman.

"You’ve heard of the 'loser' or 'lonely men' epidemic, where men disengage from relationships, accountability, and even basic hygiene, blaming society for their failures."

"But there’s a new player in town, and no, he doesn’t wear cargo shorts or live in his gaming chair. Meet the performative male: polished, aesthetically curated, emotionally fluent—on the surface. But look a little closer, and things get complicated. Welcome to the age of the performative man, a rebranded version of the emotionally unavailable alpha. Only this time, he comes armed with wired headphones, tote bags, vintage clothes, matcha lattes, Spotify playlists ft. Clairo or Laufey, and Sally Rooney books. He knows his moon sign, wears wide-leg trousers, and posts aesthetic carousels with captions about healing and self-love."

Writes Ekta Sinha, in "Forget The Lonely Men Epidemic—The Performative Male Era Is Here, And We Need To Talk (And Run)/He knows his moon sign, wears thrifted clothes, and posts aesthetic carousels with captions about healing and self-love" (Elle India).

That's the best of a bunch of recent articles I found after noticing the term "performative male."

See also: "Crowds gather on Capitol Hill for pop-up 'Performative Male Contest' in Seattle" (Fox13 Seattle)("My best description of a performative male is a man who wears feminism and softness and certain music as a guy to allure women without actually knowing anything about what they’re putting on or talking about").

"Unlike the original Vine, which required users to film their own six-second clips, Musk’s reimagined version will harness AI to generate videos..."

"... based on simple text descriptions. Users could potentially type phrases like 'a cat breakdancing in Times Square' or 'Shakespearean drama in a McDonald’s' and watch as the system instantly creates corresponding video content complete with sound."

From "Elon Musk says X will bring back Vine — with an AI twist — to rival TikTok, Reels" (NY Post).

Vine was bought by Twitter which then closed it down — all in the years before Elon Musk took over. Now, Musk is saying the old Vine video archive has been located. I like the idea of bringing Vine back, but if it's loaded with AI videos, I hate it already. 

Maybe you've seen the AI video with bunnies bouncing on a trampoline. It's got over 230 million views:

"Are you for real?"

I asked at the end of a post about an essay about social media, vacations, and self-knowledge, but it's the same question I want to ask about these videos Meade has been texting me this morning — this and this.

I texted back: "Is this real?" "Is this AI?"

I took my suspicious mind to Grok: "How can I detect AI video? I'm seeing things like [the above-linked videos]. I believe it is AI. It looks off, especially in the mouth. The person doesn't have a name and the person seems to be confidently spewing talking points. The person has attributes that seem chosen to boost credibility (often a nice-looking person of color saying something conservative)."

I know. If I hate AI, why am I using AI? Maybe AI is better at detecting AI than I am. A fight-fire-with-fire concept. It's different, at least. A second opinion.

Here's Grok's answer. It's not conclusive, but for both videos, it finds evidence that these are AI. I won't copy all that Grok had to offer. I'll just say watch the mouth. The lip shapes don't fully match the phonemes in the audio. And is the flow of language human? Catch yourself. You might like it because you think the person is articulate, but it's not human eloquence. Don't become the person who likes what is artificial.

I'm sounding the alarm. Please, we need to preserve our capacity to detect what is fake. But in the end, we are going to lose. I think we already know that, and I fear that many of us are already thinking that we prefer the fake, even if we can tell, maybe even especially when we can tell. 

"'Fake flowers are better than real,' my 5-year-old daughter, Jane, asserted as we dined on grilled cheese in a Baltimore restaurant strewn with artificial phlox. 'They don’t get all messed up.'"

From "Finding Beauty in Fake Flowers" (NYT).

***

The little girl is wrong because...

Real is inherently better than fake.

The prospect of decline makes beauty poignant.

Real flowers connect you to the natural world.

Real flowers are better for touching and smelling.

Fake flowers do get messed up — dirty, dusty, and yet you don't throw them away.

The little girl is not wrong.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"She sold antiques and handmade goods meant to conjure a slow, bucolic life: taper candles, spongeware vases, frill pillows mismatched to perfection."

"To Ms. Gelman, the store felt safe, like a 'cozy sort of womb,' she said. The entrepreneur whose brainchild had once attracted a $365 million valuation — who had named a conference room in San Francisco after Christine Blasey Ford and a phone booth in Washington after Shirley Chisholm — was now content collecting woven Longaberger baskets and dreaming up fictional English villagers to inspire the shop...."

I'm reading "First, a Feminist Utopia. Now, a Dollhouse in the Country./Audrey Gelman, the creator of the Wing, is taking another stab at shaping millennial tastes, this time with a pastoral inn — and more hotels on the way" (NYT).

The "Feminist Utopia" was the store that "felt safe, like a 'cozy sort of womb.'" Who knows what's feminist about dreamy nostalgia about English villages? 

The "Dollhouse" is an inn that the NYT describes as "a hallucinatory boardinghouse furnished by a flea market picker and haunted by Ichabod Crane" with rooms that are "almost entirely shoppable: scalloped rattan coffee tables from England ($2,250); mattresses from Massachusetts (starting at $1,349); hand-painted dinner plates ($59) from Italy; a thrifted pig-shaped cutting board ($55)."

There were lots of handmade/"handmade" signs at Madison's anti-Trump rally yesterday.

What would you do if it was your job to create the look of a truly grassroots uprising? Wonky lettering. Off-beat slogans. One thing I noticed was that the signs — most of them — were on uniformly sized white poster board. I'd go with more unfolded boxes — corrugated cardboard — and spray-painted old sheets. And the sign-holders were densely packed in front of the speaker's podium. That's photogenic, but lacking in chaotic energy. 

I was merely driving by the protests, so I can't comment on the mood. Were they angry? But these are people who just had a big political win 4 days ago — the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. They could be happy. Whatever. I'm not a source of information as I was 14 years ago, during the anti-Scott-Walker protests. 

I remember when that mild-mannered character was "Hitler":

"It is more difficult than ever for a theoretical Van Gogh to become an actual Van Gogh, a familiar reality for collectors of star 20th-century artists."

"More than a decade ago, foundations for Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, and the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, got out of the authentication business altogether. Keeping fakes from circulating is an important task but led to lawsuits that threatened their broader work."

From "Van Gogh or Faux? Weeding Out Fakes Is Starting to Take a Toll. Attributing a work to the artist generally requires authentication by the Van Gogh Museum, but lawsuits and an influx of requests have made it reassess that role" (NYT).

I like the idea of a "theoretical Van Gogh." (It makes me want to craft a joke about a vincentretical Van Gogh.) You can imagine how many people have tried to paint like van Gogh — either to pull off a fraud or just because they love Van Gogh. And here's this guy suing over something he bought cheap that would be worth many millions if it were a real Van Gogh.

He says: "I am sure that my painting is a real Van Gogh. The entire painting radiates van Gogh. Everyone who sees it only thinks of Van Gogh." But that would be the mark of a fake Van Gogh! How would you fake Van Gogh? You'd try to make the entire painting radiate Van Gogh. The curly colorful strokes, the petals and tree trunks, the little man in the field. Everyone who sees it would only think of Van Gogh!

"In order to create a 'snowy' atmosphere the tourist village purchased cotton for the snow. But it did not achieve the expected effect, leaving a very bad impression on tourists who came to visit."

Chengdu Snow Village confessed on its website, quoted in From "China snow village ‘cheats’ tourists with cotton wool and soap/Chengdu Snow Village, in Sichuan, was forced to apologise after visitors were left feeling ‘insulted'" (London Times).

Other cheesy tourism trickery from China:

"The intellectual property issue is another story we’ll get into, but this is basically the mob storming the castle saying, 'We’re here too, bitch, deal with it.'"

"You guys flaunted it and made it seem like we never get to be part of this, and now we get to be part of this fair and square."

Said Bethenny Frankel — a "Real Housewives" star — quoted in "Hermès tight-lipped on Wirkin bag, Walmart’s dupe of the Birkin/Walmart’s copy of the vastly more expensive and exclusive Birkin handbag has been praised on social media for breaking through the snobbery of high fashion" (London Times).

Hermès does not sell the Birkin online and until recently maintained a months-long waiting list, helping to protect its exclusivity. Hermès stores are only allowed to buy a select number of the bags bi-annually and the style of bags being delivered is rarely known before they arrive.... Hermès is yet to publicly comment on the Wirkin. Legal experts say the Birkin bag’s logo, its shape and design, are registered trademarks and therefore have legal protection....

"And by the aughts, oversize teeth, white as a camera flash, suited the broader popular aesthetic of exaggerated perfection: larger breasts, smaller waists, and deeper fake tans."

"Jon Marashi, an L.A.-based dentist whose clients include Halsey, Ben Affleck, and Kate Hudson... noted that large white veneers appeared on the red carpet 'at that exact moment that you saw people wearing True Religion bell-bottom jeans. The flare couldn’t be big enough, and the pocket flaps could not have been more ornate.' These ostentatious teeth — 'obscene,' said Marashi — were also the result of too much demand. As veneers became more popular, Marashi continued, there weren’t enough skilled dentists and ceramicists to keep up, and people without the proper training began to fill the gap in the market. The results were often bulky and clumsy.... Blocky veneers became ubiquitous on reality TV, especially on dating shows like Love Island, where contestants were said to have 'Turkey teeth' — shells from cheap procedures in Eastern Europe.... In the past few years, the 'more is more' aesthetic has crested. Now it’s the Hollywood actors who have left their teeth alone who have a special charismatic pull...."

From "Jawbreakers/Young patients want beautifully imperfect veneers. They’re getting pain, debt, and regret" (NY Magazine).

The celebrities with their ridiculous veneers have access to the best dentists. The ordinary people who aspire to look like them are having some horrible experiences, detailed in the article. 

You, the commenters, talked a lot yesterday about that A.G. Sulzberger column blaming Trump for efforts around the world to censor the press.

I gave you a gift link to read the whole thing in what was my first post of the day: "A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, has an opinion piece in The Washington Post: 'How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America.'"

It was a long piece, and I really did have a lot to say about it myself, but I didn't want to get dragged down dissecting what was so infuriatingly wrong about it. So I appreciated the active comments section.

The #1 thing I didn't say but wanted to say was that contrary to Sulzberger's perverted argument, criticizing the press is not censorship. Criticizing the press is more speech. Trump has been criticizing the press. It is Trump's antagonists who have pursued censorship, for many reasons, including his criticism of the press.

I'm prompted to revisit yesterday's post because I see that Glenn Reynolds is linking to it this morning. He says:

"The impression he gives is that our relationship was very fleeting — that I was a silly affair that broke up a marriage..."

"... and he got caught out. But it’s not just about our nearly five years together — this is the most enduring friendship of my life. Or it was.... We’ve offered each other a lot of emotional support. So in my heart of hearts, I always felt he would honour me properly if he were to write about me."

Said Lisa Dillon, quoted in "Patrick Stewart rewrote our five-year love story as a silly fling/The Star Trek actor’s autobiography glosses over his relationship with Lisa Dillon. The actress says she feels betrayed and diminished" (London Times).

Dillon was 23 when she was cast alongside Stewart in a production of Ibsen’s "Master Builder." Stewart was 62 and quite famous. 

What Stewart wrote in his memoir: "And so, another divorce. I felt stupid and responsible … I had cheated on my wife with a younger woman — again … And just like my affair with Jenny Hetrick, my time with Lisa Dillon would also prove to be relatively short … In a life chockablock with joy and success, my two failed marriages are my greatest regret."

How that "chockablock with joy" must irk. Stewart stayed with Dillon for 5 years, but in the memoir, she's the woman who broke up a marriage. And worse, even the transitory love was fake. Stewart writes in his book: "Life imitated art. I remember the warning I had received from an older actor decades ago, that if you keep saying ‘I love you’ to someone in a play, you can drift into believing the sentiment to be true."

Paul Simon loathes feeling groovy.

I'd seen that clip yesterday, and then this morning, when I was out on my sunrise run, the song came up in a "Daily Mix" Spotify had made for me, which I was listening to shuffled:

"What teenagers today are offered... is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics... including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep."

"These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum.... They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any 'real life' anything.... On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.... Kids are not failing by wanting to be cottagecore or meatcore or this new preppy. It’s the culture available to them that is failing.... Kids... need more, deserve more...."

Writes Mireille Silcoff, in "Teen Subcultures Are Fading. Pity the Poor Kids. Gorgeous, abundant visuals are just pale imitations of what young people used to have: an actual scene" (NYT)(free access link).

"The diamond industry is going through an existential crisis... [now that] technology and the human imagination have been able to replicate nature perfectly."

Said Jean Dousset, a great-great-grandson of Louis Cartier who is pushing the luxury end of the "lab-grown" diamonds business.

Quoted in "Lab-grown diamonds go luxury — and rock the industry" (Axios).

"Millennial women," we're told, are interested in these diamonds — they're real diamonds! — that don't come from diamond mines. One is quoted saying "I want a pretty fat ring."

How about I want the best price? No, apparently, the idea is you pay the same price you'd pay for the diamond from a mine, but you get a bigger ring. Bigger, not cheaper. Or will bigger scream "lab grown"? But who will care? Maybe it's in bad taste to expect people to mine diamonds. If you get a small lab-grown diamond, people might think you're connected to exploitation. So you simply must get the big fat one. And who cares if things are fake these days? No one comments on fake nails, fake eyelashes, hair extensions, breast implants.

And yet, that's not the point with the lab-grown diamonds. They have been determined to be real diamonds. That's why there's an "existential crisis." 

"Zappa prods at a ludicrous cast of early-’70s hipsters, suggesting that their sense of authenticity is based on thin visions of consumerism."

"'Is that a real poncho?' he asks in a sultry baritone.... During so many of his ad-libs, Zappa sounds like a parody of sleazy TV presenters. Here, we can’t tell whether he’s playing himself or someone trying to gatekeep participation in the counterculture: 'I mean, is that a Mexican poncho, or a Sears poncho?'"

Writes Daniel Felsenthal, in "Hipsters Were Always Hypocrites. Ask Frank Zappa. Of the late musician's many records, Over-Nite Sensation best crystallized his cutting satire of our country’s blank-eyed habits" (The Atlantic).

This seems to follow on yesterday's discussion of the "word of the year" — "authentic."

"Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023 is authentic.... A high-volume lookup most years, authentic saw a substantial increase in 2023..."

"... driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.... Although clearly a desirable quality, authentic is hard to define and subject to debate—two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary."

Announces Merriam-Webster.

They call attention to a headline I hadn't noticed and don't feel I even need to understand: "Three Ways To Tap Into Taylor Swift’s Authenticity And Build An Eras-Like Workplace."

That article came out a month ago in Forbes, which tells us: "Swift’s events brim with energy, carried by the thunderous voices – some melodious, others less in tune – of thousands: the opposite of how work feels today. According to recent data, 60% of employees are emotionally detached, and one in five is miserable."

Why would anyone want the workplace to feel like a pop concert? Why would the answer involve the concept of "authenticity"?

Take Hannah Shirley, a 23-year-old tech worker who recently went viral for pointing out that her job was “like a full-time acting gig.” She tik-toked one consequence of this: feeling “drained — especially mentally, sometimes even physically — from the character that …we play at work.”...

A Taylor Swift lyric is quoted: “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism? Like some kind of congressman?”

Forbes goes on:

What happens during an Eras event that makes it so engaging? There is realness, empathy, kindness, listening, a narrative (or journey-like) space big enough for all to partake and feel whole with oneself and others. The whole experience is devoid of pretension. Take this recipe and break it into three precepts – avoid alienation, increase authentic living and balance external pressure – and you have a roadmap for creating an Eras-like workplace culture....

I don't see how merger with a huge crowd is a feeling that you could — or would want — to take into the workplace. Even if I did, I wouldn't think of it as "authenticity." 

***

I've written about the word "authentic" many times on this blog. A few examples.... (and the first thing I see, strangely enough, has Taylor Swift in it):

On March 20, 2010, I quoted John Hinderaker saying "Much as Bob Dylan was the most authentic spokesman for his generation, Taylor Swift is the most authentic spokesman for hers." I say: "that's a trick assertion, since Bob Dylan was never about authenticity." I quoted Sean Wilentz:

During the first half of the concert, after singing "Gates of Eden," Dylan got into a little riff about how the song shouldn't scare anybody, that it was only Halloween, and that he had his Bob Dylan mask on. "I'm masquerading!" he joked, elongating the second word into a laugh. The joke was serious. Bob Dylan, né Zimmerman, brilliantly cultivated his celebrity, but he was really an artist and entertainer, a man behind a mask, a great entertainer, maybe, but basically just that—someone who threw words together, astounding as they were. The burden of being something else — a guru, a political theorist, "the voice of a generation," as he facetiously put it in an interview a few years ago — was too much to ask of anyone.

On June 17, 2015, I talked about a Slate writer's advice to Hillary Clinton that she should "offer voters her authentic, geeky self. I said "We've been seeing the word 'authentic' a lot lately — what with Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal. There's this idea we seem to like that everyone has a real identity inside and that if we've got an inconsistent outward presentation of ourselves it would be wonderful for the inner being to cast off that phony shell. But 'authenticity' can be another phony shell...."

On December 19, 2017, I wrote about Facebook's purported goal of "authentic engagement." I said:

Facebook wants you to engage... with Facebook. They want the direct interface with the authentic person, not for some other operation to leverage itself through Facebook. And it makes sense to say that the exclusion of these interposers makes the experience better for the authentic people who use Facebook.... 

On a more metaphysical level: What is authentic anymore? What is the authentic/artificial distinction that Facebook claims — authentically/artificially — to be the police of? Is there an authentic authentic/artificial distinction or is the authentic/artificial distinction artificial?

AND: I'm reading a book that I think has a lot to say about the authentic/artificial distinction. You can tell by the title: "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" (Subtitle: "A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace"). But the word "authentic" never appears in the book, and the word "artificial" only appears in the context of "artificial spit" ("it’s called Zero-Lube. It’s an actual pharmaceutical product").

On March 9, 2018, I blogged about something Nancy Pelosi said about "RuPaul's Drag Race." According to The Hollywood Reporter, she "suggested that politicians could learn a thing or two from Ru's girls: 'Authenticity. Taking pride in who you are. Knowing your power....'" Reading the comments on my post, I added:

Everyone jumps on that word "authenticity." "I mean, I'm all for people doing what they want -- except for misusing words like 'authenticity'" (fivewheels); "Authenticity? A man dressed as an over-the-top woman is authentic?" (Annie C); and the inevitable "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means" (Ignorance is Bliss). Yeah? Well, when a person putting on a show is in costume and makeup, you could say he's an authentic showperson. And, anyway, what makes you think you're so authentic? 

My mind drifted back to this 1967 song by Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": 

chameleons changing colors while a crocodile cries
people rubbing elbows but never touching eyes
taking off their masks revealing still another guise
genuine imitation life
people buying happiness and manufactured fun
everybody doing everybody done
people count on people who can only count to one
genuine imitation life

"Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have made it easy to generate believable audio, allowing anyone from foreign actors to music fans to copy somebody’s voice..."

"... leading to a flood of faked content on the web, sewing [sic] discord, confusion and anger. Last week, the actor Tom Hanks warned his social media followers that bad actors used his voice to falsely imitate him hawking dental plans. Over the summer, TikTok accounts used AI narrators to display fake news reports that erroneously linked former president Barack Obama to the death of his personal chef. On Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators announced a draft bill, called the No Fakes Act, that would penalize people for producing or distributing an AI-generated replica of someone in an audiovisual or voice recording without their consent...."

 
From "AI voice clones mimic politicians and celebrities, reshaping reality Experts have long predicted generative artificial intelligence would lead to a tsunami of faked photos and video. What’s emerging is an audio crisis" (WaPo).

ADDED: It's funny to see "sewing discord" for "sowing discord"! If you were sewing discord, you'd be mending it, not scattering it about.