Two Truths & An A.I.
Believing the real is fake is almost as bad as believing the fake is real
The picture you see below is one-hundred percent real.
In 2018, I spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I was then, as I am now, shaven bald. I had a goatee that would stubbornly split down the middle. I wore a Testament shirt underneath my blazer. I gave a pretty good talk.
Seriously. Ask Robin Raskin, whom I’ve known since the days of Family PC (RIP). I was there at her invitation.
Now, fast forward to 2025.
One of the joys of the Day Job has been its community.
The group that has formed around Hemi, who have called themselves “Hemigos” and “Hemigas,” has demonstrated itself as not only passionate about what we’re building but possessed of a unique sense of humor.
One such participant, who has taken a leadership role among our community manager team, decided to create Hemi’s first memecoin, reflecting the Hemigos’ consuming fascination with Hemi co-founder Max Sanchez’s hair.
Yeah, I don’t know why either. Anyway, meet HAIR.
The people behind HAIR, given their proximity to the Hemi team, inherited the Hemigo sense of humor. And if they can turn our co-founder’s enviable mane into an object of crypto-fandom, they can certainly poke fun at my gleaming dome.
So imagine my surprise one morning to find this video in my X feed.
The HAIR team took the photo from the top of this post (not even the video from the talk) and fed it through Kling.
Result: Not only do we now have full-motion video from the original still photo, but also romance-novel-worthy hair falling from the rafters and yours truly vainly running his hand through his lovely locks.
Now, let’s think about this for a second.
The fact that I was invited to speak at CES is highly career-significant. Not only are such platforms highly competitive but they are especially coveted if you happen to be in the PR trade. We’re not exactly a group that people like to hear from all that often. As one client told me “No one wants to hear from a PR person who thinks.” For me, this platform placement was a career coup.
But against the absurd context of the video, there’s really no reason to trust any of it — even the very true part that credentials me as a technology industry professional.
Face it: If made to go viral, this video would travel faster than its photographic basis. Having been exposed to the fake, you have less reason to trust the original.
I have to believe, then, that navigating the AI-fueled contentsphere isn’t going to be so much about Turing-test-like scenarios or the ability to judge a “real” content item from a “fake” one. It’s going to be about assessing, within a particular item, the composition of its reality versus its embellishments. Separating the two would be like removing the beaten eggs from a bowl of pancake batter.
A confident statement like ‘This is 100% AI-free’ in the post-ChatGPT world is going to be as worthy of suspicion as saying ‘This corn is 100% GMO-free’ in the post-Monsanto one.
It's sorta what I would expect you with hair to look like, too.