Living in Generated Reality

26 February 2026 Generative AI Mexico Authenticity Attention Jason Koebler

“If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.” — The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958

Last Sunday, the Mexican government sent a team of elite forces to capture one of the country‘s most famous cartel bosses. „El Mencho“, head of the Cartél de Jalisco Nueva Generación was wounded during the operation and subsequently died while being airlifted to a Mexico City hospital. As a reaction, the cartel unleashed a wave of violence across the country, erecting roadblocks and setting fire to gas stations and convenience stores.

At the time, I was having lunch with my family in the suburbs of Mexico City, and the news spread quickly. Everyone took out their phones and pieced together what had happened. With events this fresh, nobody knows exactly what‘s really going on. Rumors swirl, conclusions are drawn. But there were a few things we knew: The man was dead, there was some very serious rioting, and the cartel had attacked the airport in Guadalajara, causing widespread panic.

As it quickly turned out, that was only halfway true. In the wake of the rioting, the internet was flooded with misinformation and half-truths about the events, among them this AI-generated image of a plane on fire.

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Even a few days later, as the situation has calmed down and foreign embassies no longer tell their citizens to shelter in place, the picture of the burning plane looks entirely believable. There’s no benefit of hindsight here, only another confirmation that we need to be careful with everything we see online, particularly when it’s shared on social media during an ongoing news event.

Just last week, I spoke to the head of a PR agency, who told me about the shifting nature of his business. “People no longer get their news from newspapers”, he said. “They get their news from social media.”

This may not be a particularly new insight, but something about hearing it from a PR professional made it sink in: Our mediated reality now comes from real-time networks, and the advent of credible AI fakes means that it’s easier than ever for anyone with a smartphone to construct an entirely false version of what’s going on.

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I can’t help but feel some anger, even indignation about all of this. I wonder why this technology exist and who asked for it, I’m annoyed about having AI shoved down our throats as a supposed productivity tool when in reality it’s become easier to create images that make people more fearful, paranoid, or prone to manipulation.¹

When Jason Koebler wrote about Sora in 2025, he used even more drastic words:

As a reward (…) OpenAI gets a $500 billion valuation. And we get a tool that makes it even easier to flood the internet with slightly better looking bullshit at the low, low cost of nearly all of the intellectual property ever created by our species, the general concept of the nature of truth, the devaluation of art through an endless flooding of the zone, and the knock-on environmental, energy, and negative labor costs of this entire endeavor.

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How does one deal with the new reality? AI is not something we can critically ignore, and I don’t think media literacy or inherent skepticism about anything we encounter lets us outsmart the tools in the long run. As the plane in Guadalajara illustrates, the technology has reached a level of believability that makes it impossible to tell fake from real.

The only way forward that I can see is radically changing how we approach news events, by cultivating a sense of calm in the eye of the information storm. To wait until the waves of misinformation have died down and a clear reality emerges, until we can verify what’s fake and what isn’t. To resist the temptation of anger and indignation and to remain clear-headed.

The technology is here to stay, and all we got is our attention and focus.

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