The Treachery of (AI) Images

Mike Judge tried to warn us. Magritte gave us the key. Now, we’re all smoking that pipe.

It hits fast me when I’m chuggin’ a neon-blue Prime, its “electrolytes” still a vague promise of hydration.

It flickers when I slip my kids’ feet into brightly colored Crocs, those symbols of utilitarian-comfort-somehow-turned-fashion-statement.

It looms over my skull every time a Walmart greeter offers that strangely disconnected, yet relentlessly cheerful, welcome.

Pretty often, then.

But deep into last night — adrift in that late-hour psychic space between existential dread and the dopamine drip of a thousand open tabs — I’ve been thinking about Idiocracy again. About how Mike Judge, the satirical prophet we perhaps didn’t deserve but desperately needed, saw all of this coming. And with a chilling clarity, I think I finally understand the terrifying heart of his prophecy. 🙃

Dummy-See, Dummy-Do

If you recall, the 2006 film kicks off with a thesis that felt like dark comedy then, but feels like a documentary now: the “intellectuals” and the “thoughtful” meticulously plan their one perfect child, while — let’s just call them “My Hometown ” — multiply with the enthusiastic abandon of tobacco-spit-stained rabbits in a Viagra factory.

The punchline, of course, is a future America governed by Mountain Dew-addled man-children, where Costco and Carl’s Jr. are hallowed institutions, and the English language has devolved into a series of grunts and brand names.

Funny. Wickedly, absurdly funny.

Until it WAS NOT.

Yes, as we know, it started to feel less like satire and more like a slow-motion newsreel.

What Judge was really dissecting wasn’t just intelligence, or the lack thereof. He was pointing to something far more insidious, a phenomenon I’ve come to think of as the Great Normalization of Unreality.

Stay with me. This isn’t just about dick jokes and dystopian slapstick, though Judge masterfully wielded both. He was exposing the ever-widening chasm between what is and what appears to be. In his imagined future:

• Presidents were judged not on policy or intellect, but on their televised machismo and wrestling prowess.

• Mega-store greeters delivered their lines with a veneer of earnest care, a scripted sincerity that fooled no one yet was universally accepted.

• Everything — f rom healthcare (“He’s a DOK-tur!”) to agriculture (Brawndo, “The Thirst Mutilator!”) — was coated in a thick, sticky sheen of performative confidence, utterly divorced from actual substance.

Judge simply cranked these existing societal inconsistencies to eleven, as any good satirist does, crafting a caricature so exaggerated it felt surreal. That was the disturbing genius of it. President Camacho, Terry Crews’ perfectly unhinged portrayal of a machine-gun-toting porn-star president, wasn’t the gag we thought he was.

He was a grotesque, yet logical, extrapolation of cultural trends already bubbling to the surface.

Consider the political figures who have risen to prominence since (ahem), and tell me Camacho feels entirely fictional.

The internet, it turns out, responds exceptionally well to archetypes, especially the loud and ludicrous ones.

And that’s when another piece of the puzzle slammed into place. I remembered the painter.

Let’s Tap in the Painter

Flashback to 1929. The Belgian surrealist René Magritte (you may remember him from his banger Businessman-With-Apple-For-Face) paints a meticulously realistic image of a smoker’s pipe. Beneath it, in elegant cursive, he writes: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

“This is not a pipe.”

And he was, unequivocally, right. It isn’t a pipe. It’s a painting of a pipe. A representation, a symbol. Magritte wasn’t being a troll (Dalí was more your man for that particular brand of artistic goofery). He was making a profound, crystal-clear statement about a fundamental human error: we constantly mistake the symbol for the thing itself. We confuse the menu with the meal, the map with the territory, the image with the reality.

So, why drag a long-dead Belgian surrealist into 2025?

Because the internet is now supercharged, double-stuffed, and relentlessly optimized by Artificial Intelligence. And that has become the ultimate Magrittean(?) landscape.

We are living, breathing, and doomscrolling within the very world he warned us about.

Think about his painting’s title: The Treachery of Images.

Now, reflect on your last hour spent navigating the endless scroll of social media, news feeds, and AI-generated “content.”

Doesn’t that title just feel uncomfortably, terrifyingly accurate?

For a while, we even had a linguistic defense mechanism: “IRL” — In Real Life. We instinctively knew that our online existence was a curated, often distorted, B-movie Bizarro World. It was a necessary distinction. But then, the membrane thinned. Just as it did in movies, and just like in paintings that Magritte was warning us about.

Why do we continually let this happen? Why are we hurtling down this path? Because, as a society, we get conditioned to gravitate towards the representations that scream the loudest, that generate the most engagement, that affirm our pre-existing identities and biases, however divorced from reality they may be.

The attention economy shapes our perception of what’s real.

That’s how a reality TV host, a master of nothing but perhaps performative representation, ascended to the highest office and gained access to nuclear codes.

It’s how memes, digestible lil’ packets of symbolic information, out-shouted and out-maneuvered medical experts during a global pandemic.

Think it’s all bullshit? Think it doesn’t affect you? Well uh… people suffered, and people died, because of this ever-widening gap between simulation and reality. Remember that part?

And now, the plot thickens, twists, and potentially consumes itself. Because A.I. isn’t being trained on the messy, nuanced, often boring “real world.” It’s being trained on our representation of the world — on the internet, that sprawling, chaotic, often toxic archive of human expression.

Forget it Jake, it’s Meta-Hyperreality

Algorithms, already the invisible marionette masters steering our elections, economies, and our daily dopamine hits, are now the primary architects of what we see, hear, and increasingly, believe. And remember, we’re misalinged there. Bigtime.

And AI, raised exclusively on this curated, performed, often manufactured slurry? It’s not just creating simulations. It’s becoming a simulation of our simulations.

Think about that for a horrifying second: The input is already a representation — often a distorted one. The output, therefore, is an amplified, refined, and potentially more convincing distortion. The output is a simulation of a simulation.

Welcome to what we might call Meta-Hyperreality.

Next stop: the potential dissolution of the authentic self as a social, relational being.

Social media has already carved out its pound of flesh from the collective human psyche. We see it in the staggering rise of teen depression and anxiety, the wild epidemic of loneliness that is consuming society, the distorted and often harmful beliefs around body image, success, and even “traditional family values,” all fueled by the relentless, unshakeable feeling that what we’re observing online is somehow reflective of a universal reality.

We intellectually know it’s not true, that it’s a highlight reel, a performance, a carefully constructed facade. And yet… the belief, or at least the emotional impact, persists and grows.

We feed this growing fake consciousness a constant diet of our best, worst, and weirdest: our memes and flame wars, our meticulously filtered vacation photos, our Reddit rants and Buzzfeed listicles, our propaganda and our influencer thirst traps. This is its nourishment. (No wonder why it takes a considerable amount of training to make A.I. not racist and mean).

This is what it learns from. And because it was trained on what looks true, what sounds convincing, what feels engaging — not necessarily on what is factually, demonstrably true — it replicates fluency, empathy, and even apparent expertise with a proficiency that is both astonishing and deeply unnerving.

It’s not real. But it feels real-ish, doesn’t it?

That slickly generated image, that empathetically phrased chatbot response, that “original” song composed in mere seconds. Right.

That’s the precipice.

That “real-ish” feeling. Lean into that momentary cognitive dissonance for a second. That is AI perfecting our own performance and reflecting it back at us. And because we built it, however inadvertently, in our own warped, performative image, we are neurologically and psychologically wired to believe it, or at least to be seduced by it. Often, no critical questions asked.

And so, quietly, almost imperceptibly, with the gentle hum of servers and the satisfying swipe of a finger across glass… We will probably hypernormalize it all. Again.

Lulled by the siren-song of AI-generated convenience and algos that are calibrated to keep our brains marinating in sweet-sweet dopamine, we stop rigorously questioning what’s real. We settle for what scrolls. The world risks becoming a collectively curated hallucination — one where objective truth isn’t aggressively rejected, just… politely ignored, sidelined in favor of the “vibe,” the narrative, the emotionally resonant simulation.

A thousand little lies, seamlessly integrated.

A thousand little prompts, subtly shaping our thoughts. This isn’t necessarily the stuff of explosive, cinematic dystopias. It’s the quiet creep. Not with a bang — but with another perfectly rendered, impossibly cute AI-generated video of a tabby cat playing jazz piano.

We have already ended up mistaking the image of a pipe for the pipe itself, just as Magritte observed people doing nearly a century ago.

The difference now is the scale, the speed, and the stakes.

The “images” are no longer confined to art galleries; they are the very fabric of our information ecosystem, generated and disseminated at incomprehensible speeds, at virtually no cost, everywhere.

Reality as we know it is on the ropes.

Now, we’re looking at Magritte’s painting of a pipe, putting the AI-generated image of a pipe in our mouths, lighting it up, and inhaling deeply, pretending the smoke is real, hoping the drug hits.

But this drug will be stronger, and it will hit the body humanity harder and faster than any other in history.

But before we create yet another misaligned thing (like social media), or run headfirst into it and outright kill ourselves, I think it’s time we quit smoking that particular pipe.