Does AI Reality Even Exist Anymore?

When Nothing Is Real: How We’re All Living in Synthetic Realities (And What the Stoics Would Say)

There’s a deepfake of you somewhere. Maybe not yet, but soon. Give it a few years. Your voice, your face, your mannerisms—all recreated by code that’s getting better by the month. The weird part? You won’t know when it happens.

We’ve crossed a threshold, and most people haven’t noticed yet. We’re living in the first era of human history where seeing is no longer believing. Where “proof” has become a philosophical question rather than a factual one.

This should terrify us. But maybe it should also wake us up.

The Stoics had this practice called “premeditatio malorum”—the premeditation of evils. You imagine the worst thing that could happen so that when something bad actually happens, you’re not caught flat-footed. You’ve already played it out in your mind.

So let’s play it out: What happens when reality itself becomes optional?

We’re already seeing the preview. Virtual influencers with millions of followers. AI-generated news anchors. Deepfake videos of politicians saying things they never said. Dead actors resurrected for new films. The line between synthetic and authentic has become so blurred it might as well not exist.

Here’s what makes this different from every other technological shift: It’s not just changing how we work or communicate. It’s changing what we can trust as “real”. And humans aren’t wired for that level of uncertainty.

Psychologists are already documenting the effects. Reality apathy, they’re calling it. When you can’t trust your own eyes and ears, why bother paying attention at all? When any video could be fake, when any voice could be synthesized, when any image could be generated—the mind starts to shut down. Everything becomes equally meaningless.

But the Stoics would tell you: This is nothing new.

Epictetus taught that we should focus only on what’s in our control. And what’s in our control has never been external reality—it’s always been our response to it. The interpretation. The judgment. The choice of how to act.

Two thousand years ago, people were already grappling with illusion and truth. Plato’s cave. The Buddhist concept of Maya. The idea that the world we perceive is always a kind of simulation, filtered through our limited senses and constructed by our biased minds.

Synthetic reality just makes this ancient truth impossible to ignore.

So what do we do? Do we retreat into paranoia, trusting nothing? Do we give up on truth entirely and embrace the chaos?

Or do we do what humans have always done when external certainty crumbles: We anchor ourselves in internal truth.

You know what can’t be synthesized? The feeling in your chest when you see real injustice. The quiet knowledge of your own intentions. The weight of a decision you actually have to make. The sensation of being alive in this moment, right now, reading these words.

AI can fake everything except “being you”. It can replicate your patterns but not your consciousness. It can simulate your voice but not your lived experience. It can generate a thousand versions of what you might say, but it can’t know what it’s like to be the specific collection of atoms and experiences that you are.

This is what matters now: Cultivating that internal compass. Knowing yourself so well that you can’t be fooled—not by others, and not by machines. Building relationships deep enough that you know the real person beneath the possible fakes. Creating work so distinctly yours that imitation is irrelevant.

The rise of synthetic reality is actually an invitation. An invitation to get more real, not less. To double down on authenticity in a world drowning in simulation. To build communities based on trust that goes deeper than surface verification.

Marcus Aurelius wrote: “If it’s not right, don’t do it. If it’s not true, don’t say it.” Simple. Direct. Impossible to misinterpret.

In the age of synthetic reality, this becomes our North Star. Not because external truth is dead, but because internal truth is all we’ve ever really had.

The machines can fake everything we can see and hear. They can’t fake what you know to be true about yourself. They can’t fake the choice you make when no one’s watching. They can’t fake your character.

Welcome to the post-digital age. Where the only reality that matters is the one you build inside yourself, one honest choice at a time.

That’s the reality no algorithm can touch.