The Synthetic Nothing: The collapse of the real in the face of the artificial.

By: Guillermo Ramírez Lovera

1. The Bottle Airplane

It all started on an ordinary Tuesday last October, while I was doing what almost all of us do to “disconnect” and which, ironically, connects us to a network currently full of doubts: scrolling through social media. Suddenly, I came across a Facebook post (yes, I still use Facebook) by Ticio Escobar. For those who don’t know him, Ticio is perhaps one of the most lucid minds and one of the most trained perspectives on art in Paraguay. And yet, there he was, moved, sharing an image of a child who supposedly had built an airplane out of plastic bottles because his parents, due to their limited resources, could not buy him one.

The image was striking, perfect, emotional. And it was also fake.

It took me less than a second to realize that nothing in the scene was real: from the perfect plastic-bottle airplane, to the lighting of the image, to the child’s expression—everything was the product of a generative artificial intelligence. At that moment I felt a different kind of itch. If an aesthetic authority like Ticio—someone who dedicated his life to looking at and understanding images—could be fooled by AI, what is left for the rest of us? I took a screenshot and sent it to Maricarmen Sequera, from TEDIC. “Look at this,” I wrote. That screenshot was the spark for this text.

I don’t write this to say that AI is the devil, nor to ask you to throw your smartphone into a river. That would be a luxury for a few and a blindness toward the usefulness of these tools. I write because we are facing a social dilemma we can no longer ignore: reality is fraying at the seams that once held it together and made it functional.

To explain this, I want to use an analogy that people over 40 might remember: “The Nothing.” In The Neverending Story, a novel by Michael Ende successfully adapted into film in the 1980s, the world of imagination is dying. In this story, the villain is not a biting monster, but something known as the Nothing. It is an empty force that advances and erases everything it touches. What is most unsettling is that, in the story, things that fall into the Nothing do not die; they simply pass into our world (the real one) transformed into lies.

That is exactly what I feel today in front of my screens. Generative AI is functioning like that Nothing, advancing without pause. We are no longer merely dealing with sophisticated “fake photos”; we are losing the ground of what is real. When everything we can imagine—or that can be imagined—can be created with a text command, our capacity for wonder is devalued and truth becomes extremely difficult to define.

Why is this happening so fast? Because this is not only a scientific or technological advance, but a race for money. Big tech companies entered a multi-billion-dollar game and now need all of us to use their tools for the business to work out. There is a sense of a gigantic financial bubble (CBS News, 2024; Estrategias de Inversión, 2024) that needs you to subscribe, generate images, share them on your networks, be amazed by what is created and what you can create. They are not waiting to see if society is ready to distinguish a deepfake from a real photo; they are launching products at a speed that does not care about moral questions, because financial markets seek nothing more than return on investment.

What happened with Ticio was not the mistake of a distracted man; it was the symptom of a society that is progressively losing the ability to distinguish the real from the synthetic.

2. Epistemic support: Why our brain chooses deception

If the Nothing is advancing, it is because it finds fertile ground. And in our digital, hyperconnected world, that ground is our own psychology. Generative AI does not need to be perfect to deceive us; it only needs to be “good enough” for our brains—always in a hurry as we jump from one piece of content to another—to fill in the gaps.

There is a concept that Canadian scholar Regina Rini explains very well: “epistemic support” (Rini, 2020). For decades, photos and videos were the ultimate proof that something had happened. “If there’s a photo, it’s true.” That was our solid ground. But today, that ground looks more like quicksand. We can no longer distinguish a real face from a synthetic one; science says so: recent studies show that AI-generated faces already appear more real to us than human ones (Miller et al., 2023).

This phenomenon becomes particularly dangerous when it leaves the laboratory and enters the muddy terrain of politics and everyday life. Consider the TikTok deepfake showing Horacio Cartes and “Nenecho” Rodríguez in a passionate kiss. Although it was an obvious manipulation made for humor, it spread with incredible force. Why? Because the Nothing feeds on our biases, on what we already believe. We do not share these things because we think they are journalistic photographs, but because they reinforce what we already think about others. Synthetic images are perfect fuel for fanaticism: I no longer need something to be true; it is enough that it “looks like” what I want to be true.

But there is an even darker side, and that is when AI exploits loneliness. You may have read about the French woman who recently lost 850,000 dollars because she believed she was in a relationship with Brad Pitt (Pascual, 2024). A synthetic Brad Pitt, of course. In this case, AI is not just a meme; it is a surgical weapon used by criminal groups to exploit emotional vulnerability. And on this front line, our elderly are the most exposed. Recent data confirms that the older a person is, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish the artificial from the real (Nightingale et al., 2024). While tech companies race ahead in a financial competition, they are leaving behind an entire generation that grew up in a world where what you saw—even on a screen—was real.

Even figures such as Pope Leo XIV have had to warn about these dangers (Diario HOY, 2026). This is not a religious concern; it is a concern about human dignity. When AI-generated “medical influencers” begin giving unsupervised health advice (CBS News, 2024), or when low-quality content—the so-called AI slop flooding social media—starts even rewriting sensitive historical events such as the Holocaust (UNESCO, 2024; CBS News, 2026), what we are losing is our social archive, our history, our collective memory. If we allow this overwhelming phenomenon to consume our past and confuse our present, we will be left with nothing on which to build a shared future.

3. The day we stopped believing our own eyes

If we accept, as discussed above, that Rini’s epistemic support has broken down, what remains is a territory where evidence is no longer proof but a formality open to interpretation. Engineer and journalist Karen Hao, in her investigation of the “AI Empire” (Hao, 2024), reveals a troubling structure behind companies like OpenAI. Under the leadership of figures such as Sam Altman, the absolute priority has not been accuracy, safety, or informational integrity, but market domination through massive and aggressive scaling. These tools were not trained in sterile laboratories in pursuit of truth; they were trained by ingesting data from across the internet in an opaque and unauthorized way, with a single goal: for the machine to be, above all, convincing and to reach the market as quickly as possible.

In this capital-driven arms race, truth is treated as an opportunity cost or, at worst, an inconvenience. The success of today’s generative models does not lie in their ability to reflect reality, but in their ability to simulate it so perfectly that our cognitive defenses are deactivated. When we encounter a deepfake, we are not facing a system failure; we are facing a system working exactly as designed—to make the synthetic indistinguishable from the real, prioritizing the capture of our awe, our time, and our money over the integrity of our perception.

This scenario is what allows events like the Ticio Escobar case to happen. It is crucial to return to this point because it breaks the myth that deception is a matter of “lack of education” or carelessness, or of “it won’t happen to me.” Ticio Escobar has one of the most trained visual perspectives in Paraguay; he has dedicated his life to deconstructing images, uncovering their political symbolism and aesthetic layers. Yet generative AI achieved something no manual montage had achieved before: it hacked our biology. The hyperrealism of AI—confirmed by cognitive psychology studies from the University of Amsterdam and ANU in 2023 (Miller et al., 2023)—shows that our brains already judge synthetic faces and scenes as “more human” than real ones.

AI has managed to bypass the famous “uncanny valley”—that instinctive sense of rejection toward what looks almost human but not quite—and place us in a visual comfort zone where the fake appears more coherent, sharper, and even more aesthetically pleasing than reality itself. When Ticio shared that image of the child with the plastic-bottle airplane, he was not deceived by a crude lie, but by a technology that knows exactly how to manufacture the “beauty” and “emotion” the human eye seeks. If the expert gaze—the one that acts as a critical filter for the rest of society—can be fooled by a model trained on remote servers, then epistemic support is indeed at risk.

Once this support collapses, the most serious consequence is not being deceived by a touching image, but the dissolution of testimony. Regina Rini warns that if we lose the ability to trust visual records, we lose the ability to hold truth accountable to power. In a world without epistemic support, reality becomes a matter of opinion—something we are increasingly experiencing today, especially on social media when debating global events. The Nothing does not need to hide facts; it only needs to flood the ecosystem with synthetic versions until ordinary citizens, exhausted by constant doubt, conclude that “nothing is true and everything is possible.” This is the true metaphysical defeat: a society that can no longer agree on what its own eyes are seeing is a society that has lost the capacity to coordinate in order to demand justice, build memory, or defend its rights.

The responsibility for discernment has been violently shifted onto the individual, but in an environment where the main tool of our lives—the smartphone—is the same one flooding us with simulacra at a speed critical thinking cannot keep up with. We are navigating a sea of images without a compass, where informational “Nothing” fills every space of doubt with noise, suspicion, and ultimately a cultural exhaustion that stains everything with a dark ocean of uncertainty that leads to indifference.

4. From the “liar’s dividend” to collective amnesia

If the breakdown of visual evidence were only an individual perception problem, the dilemma would be minor—a matter of visual literacy or “looking more carefully.” The real problem is that this erosion happens within an ecosystem of power where truth is no longer a shared goal, but a bargaining chip subject to the laws of supply and demand. As the solid ground of what is real disappears, we enter a scenario that researchers Kaylyn Schiff and Daniel Schiff call the “liar’s dividend” (Schiff et al., 2023). It is a perfect and unsettling logical trap: in a world where everyone knows deepfakes exist, political actors and figures of power gain an automatic escape hatch to deny reality.

Now, any incriminating evidence—a video of bribery recorded on a phone, an audio confession, or a photo of state negligence—can be dismissed with the excuse that “it was created by AI.” There is no need to technically prove it false; it is enough to sow sufficient doubt to paralyze public outrage and accountability. In Paraguay, a country with historically fragile institutions, the “liar’s dividend” acts as an accelerator of impunity. Today, the mere existence of generative AI grants the corrupt a permanent reasonable doubt. The greatest danger of this digital Nothing is not the creation of believable lies, but the public execution of truths.

This structural vulnerability is amplified by what British tech entrepreneur Mustafa Suleyman describes, in The Coming Wave (Suleyman & Bhaskar, 2023), as the “mass proliferation” nature of this technological wave. Unlike other critical technologies in history—such as nuclear energy or aviation—the capacity to generate hyperrealistic disinformation does not require large infrastructure, enriched uranium, or state permissions. It is a technology with near-zero marginal cost, easy to replicate, and practically impossible to contain once the code is online. This “democratization of deception” means that the ability to flood public discourse with simulations is no longer exclusive to state intelligence services; today it is in the hands of any group with political or economic interest, or even any individual willing to create confusion.

Suleyman warns that we are facing a force that exceeds any human capacity for monitoring. When synthetic content production surpasses our ability to verify it by orders of magnitude, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses. The result is citizen fatigue: unable to know what is true, people end up believing only their own “tribe,” turning synthetic imagery into perfect fuel for fanaticism, especially in digital spaces.

But the risk escalates when AI leaves the political sphere and targets our most intimate emotional and physical security. We are seeing how identity manipulation for scams—using hyperrealism to simulate kidnapping scenarios or non-existent romantic relationships—is destroying the most basic fabric of social trust. This detection gap is not only technical; it is generational and therefore political. If earlier we saw how confirmation bias affects even trained observers, in electoral ecosystems this becomes a systemic vulnerability. Populations with lower digital literacy, such as our elderly, are not only more exposed to deception but are also used as involuntary vectors to viralize misinformation that erodes public conversation. The “Nothing” does not only dismantle images; it dismantles bridges of understanding between generations.

However, the deepest danger—and the one that should concern us most as a society—is the one affecting our historical memory. The so-called AI slop (low-quality synthetic content flooding social networks and video platforms) is already beginning to “contaminate” historical records, as AI systems start to retrain on what people produce with them. As UNESCO warns, we risk entering an era of organized amnesia (UNESCO, 2024). The databases we will use in ten or twenty years to understand who we were will be flooded with synthetically altered versions of history. Imagine a Paraguay where images of social struggles or dictatorship periods are mixed with AI-generated visuals that “soften” events or invent protagonists.

The Nothing does not destroy facts through force; it simply renders them irrelevant by burying them under a mountain of simulations that are more polished, aesthetic, and easier to consume than raw, sometimes boring reality. A people that can no longer distinguish its real history from one generated by a foreign server is a people that has lost its cultural and historical sovereignty. TEDIC reports on strategic vulnerability in cyberspace take on an existential meaning here (Heduvan, 2025): if we do not protect the integrity of our information and memory, we are handing our identity over to opaque algorithms that have no commitment to truth, only to user engagement. In the end, if the Nothing consumes the past, it leaves us without a map for navigating the future, turning our culture into a perpetual synthetic present where nothing has weight and nothing truly matters.

5. The dictatorship of perfection: when reality becomes boring

There is also a silent danger in the infinite capacity of generative AI: the devaluation of what exists, of “real reality.” If, with a text command, I can generate a “perfect” sunset over a landscape that exists only in my desire, what incentive do I have to go out and look for the real sunset, with its mosquitoes, Paraguayan heat, and the imperfection of a horizon full of ANDE power lines?

We are entering what could be called the dictatorship of algorithmic aesthetics. AI does not offer us reality; it offers an “optimized” version of it. It gives us the landscape that should be, not the one that is. And here appears what, for me, is the most serious symptom of the Nothing: the erosion of our capacity for wonder. Human wonder arises from unpredictability, from limitation, from knowing that something is unique and may not be the same tomorrow. But when the infinitely limitless is one click away, surprise is devalued.

The risk is that we begin to perceive “real reality” as a defective draft of the synthetic. If AI-generated videos—even when we know they are artificial—are more vibrant, more emotionally engaging, and precisely tailored to our desires and stimuli, then reality starts to feel boring, slow, and above all, non-customizable. Nature and society cannot be “prompted.” A real encounter with a stranger in the street has friction, awkward silences, and risk. AI, by contrast, is an artifact that always returns what we want to see, in the way we want to see it.

This is the ultimate form of the Nothing: a society that prefers the comfort of its smartphone—where it can fabricate tailor-made paradises—over the risk of going out to discover a world that does not belong to it and cannot be controlled. When “the real” is no longer enough, it is not that technology has won; it is that we have handed over our curiosity and humanity on a plate. We become the citizens of “Fantasia” who, by ceasing to believe in the value of the authentic, allow the void to slowly consume their world.

6. Paths of resistance: the sovereignty of the real

At this point, the question is inevitable: are we condemned to live in the “Nothing”? If we accept that technology is not going to reverse course and that Silicon Valley’s financial race will continue flooding our screens with synthetic content, the answer cannot be surrender or isolation. The way out is not an “off switch,” but the construction of a collective and conscious resistance. There is no single solution, but there are paths we can begin to walk today.

The first path is institutional and political, always. We cannot allow the security of our reality to depend solely on the goodwill of tech companies. We need organizations such as TEDIC, together with the state, to demand clear regulations. A fundamental step is the mandatory implementation of AI markers (digital watermarks or authenticity metadata). Just as we require food to be labeled with its ingredients, we must require that any synthetically generated image or video carries a seal identifying it—and one that is difficult to remove. The European Union has already begun investigating platforms such as Elon Musk’s Grok for generating unregulated sexualized and misleading images (Reuters, 2026). Paraguay cannot be an island in this; we need to fight for and collaborate on global transparency standards that guarantee our right to know what we are consuming and how it was produced.

The second path is literacy and the “critical pause.” We must learn to be skeptical again—but not a cynical skepticism that denies everything, rather a more methodical one. As individuals, our best tool is doubt before the click. Before sharing that image that triggers instant outrage, or that news story that seems “too good to be true,” we must ask basic questions: Who published it? Are there other sources confirming it? Are there signs of AI (six-fingered hands, overly smooth textures, strangely blurred backgrounds)? Learning to identify these markers—while they still exist—is a form of basic digital hygiene in the current era.

However, the deepest path—and the one I want to emphasize most—is that of “real reality.” Here I want to be very clear: proposing that people “stop using smartphones” is, today, a position that carries a class privilege. For the vast majority of people in the world, that device is the link to distant family, a work tool, a way to receive money transfers, or to coordinate daily life. Asking people to disconnect is asking them to be excluded. Resistance is not digital exile; resistance is physical reconnection, the building of a diverse, rich, and strong social fabric.

Our humanity exists and strengthens itself outside algorithms. The way out of the erosion of wonder is to return to looking at what is near us. It is to inhabit shared spaces—whether a plaza, a market, the long Sunday table, or a street conversation with a neighbor. In those spaces, AI still has no jurisdiction. The wonder that the Nothing steals from us on screens—where everything is perfect but empty—is recovered in the imperfection of the tangible, in finding beauty in real and nearby things. A face-to-face conversation offers something no language model can replicate: presence, real tone of voice, a gesture that has not been processed by a graphics card.

Building a resilient social fabric means understanding that, although smartphones and even artificial intelligence are useful, they cannot be our mirror of the world. If we let our entire lives pass through the filter of the screen, we are handing the keys of our reality to a handful of corporations that see us only as subscribers and data points. Stepping into the real is an act of political personal sovereignty. It is deciding that my capacity to be amazed by a real photograph of a jaguar in the Chaco, or by my mother’s face, carries more weight than any image generated by a prompt. In that insistence on the human, on what can be touched and smelled, is where the Nothing finally stops.

7. Naming reality: a negotiation with the void

At the end of The Neverending Story, the kingdom of Fantasia has been reduced to a single grain of sand. Everything else—its landscapes, its creatures, its history—has been devoured by the Nothing. The Childlike Empress explains to the protagonist that the world can be reborn, but only if he has the courage to give it a name. Salvation does not come from an epic battle, but from an act of recognition and will: naming reality in order to restore its existence.

We are in a similar situation today. Generative AI is a technology I personally find fascinating, but if we allow it to advance without naming it and without limits, it will eventually devour our ability to distinguish truth. The risk is not that machines become intelligent; the risk is that we become indifferent. That we look at a post from a figure like Ticio Escobar, or a manipulated political video, or a scam that exploits someone’s loneliness, and simply shrug, thinking: “that’s just how things are now.”

That indifference is what feeds the Nothing. This is why this article is a call to “name” things again. To name AI for what it is: a powerful tool of synthesis and replication, but never a source of truth or humanity, and even less of real wonder. To name our reality as something sacred that deserves protection through regulation, education, and above all, physical presence.

When I sent that screenshot to Maricarmen that October, I did it because I felt something was breaking. Today, after examining the risks and possible paths forward, I am convinced that this break does not have to be permanent. We have the opportunity to renegotiate our relationship with technology. We can choose not to be complicit in a collective amnesia.

Recovering wonder for what is authentic, pausing before sharing, and fundamentally returning to looking each other in the eyes without a screen in between—these are the acts of resistance that will keep our “grain of sand” safe. As in the story used as an analogy throughout this text, the future of our “Fantasia”—which is nothing other than our own human reality—depends entirely on us. It is time to give it a name and reclaim our right to live in a world where seeing something with our own eyes becomes, once again and for good, a form of believing.

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