The Phenomenon
Open Instagram or TikTok lately and you will be served ads featuring people who do not exist, generated by AI, performing scripted enthusiasm for products that often do not exist yet either. Synthetic humans, synthetic emotions, synthetic endorsements. An entire fake-UGC industrial complex, scaling fast.
It is sickening. I want to say that plainly.
What It Reveals About Us
The complaint runs deeper than aesthetics. The fact that "let's manufacture humans to praise our product" is now a normal business decision says something about the shape of the society that made it normal.
We have decided it is acceptable, even savvy, to fabricate people to push things they do not love. Often things that are not real yet. The pitch is for a product that does not exist, performed by a person who does not exist, sold to someone the seller does not care about. Three layers of nothing wearing the costume of a transaction.
That is a sick society visible through one of its symptoms.
The End Game
Carry it forward. What does industrial-scale simulated humanity actually produce?
Manipulation. Scams. Real money moving from real people to operators who decided that fooling someone is a business model. Civilizational-scale dishonesty as a cost-of-doing-business assumption. The harder it gets to tell what is real, the more value flows to whoever is best at faking it.
It is soulless and it is anti-human. The people building it are mostly doing it because the short-term unit economics work, which is the lowest possible bar for justifying anything.
The Backlash Is Structural
People are not going to keep absorbing this forever.
People of discernment are reverting to a simple decision rule: I will only take advice, buy products, trust information, and follow recommendations from real humans I personally trust. The synthetic ad ecosystem trained them to do this. Every fake testimonial they were served was a tuition payment toward stronger filters.
This is the trust economy compounding. See heartshare for why character is the moat now, and distorted signal for why the algorithmic feed itself is structurally untrustworthy.
Two Parallel Tracks
The shift creates two tracks running in opposite directions.
On one side: the trust economy, which is also the truth economy. Real people, real products, real testimony, earned reputation. Slow to build, hard to fake, durable.
On the other side: a parallel anti-economy of scams, embellishments, and get-away-with operators. Fast money, synthetic everything, a treadmill of manufactured consent that eventually collapses on itself.
Both will exist. People are choosing which track they want to be on and which track they want to buy from. The choice is not subtle. One compounds. The other corrodes.
If Your AI Clone Is More Charismatic Than You
A specific challenge for anyone tempted by the AI-version-of-you industry.
If a generative video of you is more charismatic than the real you, treat that as a signal to work on your personality, not as a green light to ship the clone. The clone is a mirror exposing the gap. Closing the gap by becoming more present, more articulate, more interesting, more alive is the actual move. Outsourcing the gap to a synthetic stand-in compounds the problem you were trying to hide.
You cannot AI-fy your way to depth. You can only become it.
The Posture
I am against this. Not in a panicked way. In a settled way. I am building inside the trust economy on purpose, with my actual face, voice, history, mistakes, and friends. The compounding I want is the kind that does not require lying to anyone.
The shortcut is real. The shortcut is also the trap. Take the long way.
Synthetic humans selling fake products to people the seller does not care about is what the end of an economy looks like, not the future of one. Be a real person, build real things, sell to people you actually love. The trust economy is going to eat the rest.