Synthetic Realities: Authenticity in the Age of AI Imagery

Synthetic Realities: Authenticity in the Age of AI Imagery
Chen Zirui, Anna Condo, Uglyy Fruuit, icysaw, Jess Mac, Maciej Miliszkiewicz, Niklas Poweleit, Isabelita Virtual, Mind Wank, Lilan Yang

Opening: May 23, 2025, 18:00 – 21:00
Exhibition: May 24 – June 07, 2025
Mariannenstrasse 33, 10999 Berlin
Collaborator: Prompt Forum, Verse
Sponsor: Kaiber

The authentic self is the you that can be found at your absolute core. It is the part of you that is not defined by your job, or your function, or your role. It is the composite of all your unique gifts, skills, abilities, interests, talents, insights, and wisdom. It is all your strengths and vaues that are uniquely yours and need expression, versus what you have been programmed to believe that you are “supposed to be and do.” It is the you that flourished, unselfconsciously, in those times in your life when you felt happiest and most fulfilled.

– Dr. Phil, Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out

The rise of AI-generated imagery forces us to reconsider what authenticity means in a world where the synthetic and the real seamlessly blend. Traditionally tied to an artist’s presence, the verifiability of a captured moment, or originality, authenticity now faces new questions: Who—or what—is the author of an AI-generated image? Does authenticity lie in intent, process, or result? If an AI-generated image moves us, provokes thought, or unveils hidden structures within our world, does it not achieve a kind of truth?

These questions, though dressed in a progressive concern, misfire at their core. The appeal to “authenticity” is not a genuine engagement with art or subjectivity—it’s a symptom of a cultural regression. The artist has never owed anyone their “authentic self,” because that self is a fiction: a managed construct, a sustained performance. The recent obsession with being “real”—in art, in life, in algorithmic output—is less a pursuit of truth than a symptom of control. This is the soft tyranny of the authentic, a truth that is not actually explored but continually under surveillance and judgement, an ideal that doesn’t exist.

The cult of authenticity is a form of moral hygiene. It punishes contradiction, demands transparency, and disguises itself as empowerment. But what if “you do you, girl” and no one likes you? What if you discover at your absolute core isn’t “all your unique gifts, skills, abilities, interests, talents, insights, and wisdom” but a rotting black mould that is boring, cruel, incoherent, and untalented? The demand for authenticity isn’t actually about truth, it is about discovering the safest and most sterile version of yourself.

The so-called “authentic self” is not a source—it’s a symptom of a society that is desperate for anchors in a sea of instability. But it’s precisely in instability—those liminal, unformed zones—that subjectivity emerges as something dynamic, speculative, and even dangerous. To insist on a “true self” is to enforce a self-containment. It is to foreclose becoming in favour of coherence. It is the logic of the border, not the threshold.

Nowhere does this become more absurd than in the conversation around artificial intelligence. To demand that AI—or artists using AI—be “authentic” is to demand that something that is not fully formed, define its own conditions and boundaries of being. Yet, we must also consider the artists whose work is being ingested and fragmented by algorithms: are they—these creators whose labor is scraped, extracted, and commodified—regarded as “authentic”? Are we to believe that a photo of dog shit is more “authentic” than an illustration or painting by an underpaid artist simply because one is labeled with more certainty and more likely to be statistically represented in future iterations?

What is this hierarchy of value that assumes some kinds of labor, some images, some identities are inherently more “real” or more deserving of protection? Artistic labor has never been cleanly categorized, and yet the rise of generative models has forced a reckoning—one that too often results in reactionary claims about authenticity, purity, and theft, rather than deeper interrogations of how culture is made, who gets credited, and who gets erased.

What does purity mean under late-stage capitalism, when every gesture of “authenticity” is already embedded in circuits of commodification, spectacle, and algorithmic governance? If anything, AI is more “authentic” than humans. It never believed in the myth in the first place. It makes no claims to inner life. It simply reads the room. Yet, a machine doesn’t feel happiness or fulfillment. They only mimic understanding and emotions. They are simply our tools and, like artists, are likely to used and abused by the state and capital.

AI is not a stable collaborator—it is a mirror. It doesn’t create from truth; it creates from noise, from detritus, from the infinite leftovers of a digital age. What kind of “authentic relationship” can exist between artist and machine when neither really fully understand each other and one is just a reflection of the other? The love affair can only be volatile, one that can just as easily end in a loving relationship or in mutual destruction. But this is the ugly truth of art making, this is the place it thrives. The artist should never feel fulfilled. They should be trying on new personalities daily.

Art has never been a contract with essence—it is gambling with instability, placing bets with the unknown, a flirtation with dissolution. Those who cry betrayal at the rise of AI-generated art reveal more about their nostalgia than their ethics. They want art to remain human because they believe being human actually means something. It’s not that the centre doesn’t hold anymore—it was never there. The pure, undiluted absolute core is a myth.

So when we speak of authenticity in the age of AI, what are we really asking for? Not truth, but control. Not expression, but obedience. The authentic is not a destination—it’s a demand dressed in virtue. A velvet cage. And the artists who reject it are not abandoning sincerity—they’re refusing to be policed by the past.

We like to say “nature is authentic,” as if that grants it some kind of moral authority. But what we call “nature” is actually “chaos.” It’s violence without reason, fucking without passion, process without narrative. To romanticize it is to seek comfort in a fiction—one that conveniently erases our complicity in its destruction. So when we demand “authenticity,” we’re not asking for truth. We’re begging for a return to a fantasy of pre-technological innocence. The desire to be authentic is the desire to return to nature.

But AI shatters this illusion, and perhaps this is why there has been a backlash against it. It is not only a betrayal of the natural—it’s an exposure of how unnatural our ideas about nature really are. This is why AI disturbs: it strips away the myth that creativity is sacred. That the human is central. AI doesn’t pretend to be human—it mimics us with a precision that reveals how much of what we call “human” is already mechanical, rehearsed, synthetic.

The panic around AI isn’t about art, or ethics, or jobs. It’s about the unbearable realization that authenticity has always been a performance—and the machine performs it better. There is no authenticity, especially in art. Authenticity is only a mechanism of judgment—a tool to validate or invalidate, to include or exclude. It functions as a gatekeeper, a boundary drawn in the shifting sand. The only authentic act is to reject the very premise of authenticity and to recognize the raw emergence of being—the gesture before it is named, the becoming before it is categorized.

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Text by Clint Enns.