PERCEPTION OR TRUTH
IN POLITICS AND ART
The new generation of AI artists is creating people who never lived yet feel more alive than many of the influencers who dominate our feeds. Kelly Boesch is one of the clearest examples of this shift. In her own TikTok posts she talks about how she loves using AI to create characters that would be difficult or impossible to make any other way, and how much joy she finds in building strange, expressive personalities that exist only in the digital space.
Her work is not about deception. It is about beauty and artistic possibility. But the line between the two is getting thinner every month as synthetic humans become indistinguishable from real performers. Her work offers a preview of what will be presented as reality someday very soon.
The rise of artists like Boesch has collided with a parallel explosion of synthetic political content. The same tools that let an artist build a believable fictional human also let a political actor build a believable fictional pundit. The same realism that makes an AI character compelling in a short film makes a deepfake persuasive in a campaign season. And the platforms know it.
Meta’s recent moderation tightening is not a sign of partisan leaning. It is a sign of panic. They are trying to contain a wave of synthetic media that is arriving faster than their detection systems can evolve. The question is not whether Meta leans right or left. The question is whether Meta can keep its footing at all in a world where authenticity is being ripped away as an expectation in media.
The political implications are already visible. Synthetic talking heads are being used to mimic commentary, amplify outrage, and seed confusion. Foreign actors have begun experimenting with AI generated personalities that can speak in local dialects and mimic regional concerns. The goal is not persuasion. The goal is erosion.
When people cannot trust what they see, they cannot trust one another. And when trust collapses, democracy becomes easier to manipulate. This is the environment in which deepfakes become a tool of destabilization rather than persuasion.
The most probable ways we will deal with this problem are already emerging. The first is content provenance, a system where real videos carry cryptographic signatures from the moment they are recorded. This creates a verifiable origin trail that allows anyone downstream to confirm that the footage began its life as an authentic capture rather than a synthetic fabrication.
The second is device level authenticity, where cameras embed invisible markers that prove footage has not been altered. This creates a chain of trust from the moment of capture, allowing platforms and viewers to verify that what they are seeing is a genuine recording rather than a synthetic reconstruction.
The third is platform level filtration, a shift in which social networks begin automatically downranking, quarantining, or labeling synthetic media before it reaches mass circulation. Platforms are already experimenting with AI systems that can detect the statistical fingerprints of generated content and quietly push it out of the recommendation stream.
This moment feels like a strange inversion of the old question about life imitating art. Artists like Boesch are imagining new kinds of humans. The political world is imagining new kinds of influence. And the platforms are imagining new kinds of control. The result is a landscape where fiction and reality are no longer opposites. They are competitors.
Imelda Marcos is widely quoted for a line that has become one of the most revealing statements about her worldview. In the documentary The Kingmaker, she says:
“Perception is real, truth is not.”
It’s a blunt expression of how she understood power, image, and narrative. And it’s also one of the clearest early articulations of the idea that controlling what people believe can matter more than controlling what is factually true.
The future will not be defined by what is true. It will be defined by what is perceived. _
Sources: Kelly Boesch TikTok posts, Kelly Boesch Instagram reels. #douglasarthurjohnson **SUBSCRIBE AND SHARE**