Post-Truth as a Business Model

Perceived value matters more than physical reality. The sentence appears everywhere in the AI industry. I underlined it the first time I read it because it took my breath away. Not because it’s shocking. But because it’s written so casually.

It’s about AI-generated content. Virtual products, virtual people, virtual experiences. The thesis is: it doesn’t matter whether something physically exists, as long as the output works for the user. As long as there’s engagement. As long as there’s conversion. As long as someone clicks, buys, interacts.

This is not a side thought. This is the central logic.

And this logic has a name that was coined in a different context. Post-truth. When the word was chosen as word of the year in 2016, it referred to politics. To the idea that facts matter less than feelings. That it doesn’t matter whether something is true, as long as it works.

Back then, many people were outraged. It was a symptom of decline. A sign that something was going wrong. That we were losing our grip on reality.

Ten years later, the same principle appears in every other industry text, and nobody is outraged. Because this time it’s not about politics, it’s about business. And in business, post-truth was always normal. It was just called something else: marketing.

Marketing has always worked with the gap between reality and perception. The picture of the burger doesn’t look like the burger. The ad promises a feeling the product doesn’t deliver. Everyone knows that. Nobody minds. Because we’ve learned that advertising exaggerates. We learned the code and automated the translation.

But AI takes this to a different level. It’s no longer about exaggeration. It’s about the product itself not needing to be real. The influencer doesn’t exist. The photo shows a place that doesn’t exist. The review wasn’t written by a customer. The voice on the phone belongs to nobody.

If perceived value matters more than physical reality, then reality is a cost factor. Something you can cut. Why photograph a real person when a generated image is cheaper and performs better? Why visit a real place when a virtual one gets the same engagement rate? The logic is consistent. It’s also insane.

I mean that literally. The insanity is not that it works. It works. The numbers add up. The clicks come in. The revenue gets made. The insanity is that we’re building an economy where reality is optional. Where you no longer know whether something is real, and you’re supposed to not care, because the output checks out.

Does it? In the short term, yes. But what happens to a society where nobody asks whether something is real anymore? Where the question itself is considered irrelevant?

I don’t know. And I don’t think the people building these systems know either. But they don’t ask the question. For them, the sentence is a statement. Not a warning. Not a diagnosis. A description of the status quo that doubles as a recommendation: this is how it works. Get on board.

Perceived value matters more than physical reality. In another era, someone would have written that sentence as dystopia. Today it’s in practical handbooks.

Between those two framings lies something we’ve lost. I’m not sure we have a name for it. But it’s missing.