The Pre-AI Timestamp
In a few years, the only proof something is real will be that it existed before AI did.
I was watching the news this week. A segment about AI-generated fake videos of snowstorms in the US and Russia. Journalists carefully debunking synthetic footage, frame by frame.
I thought: this won’t scale.
Right now, we’re in a strange transitional moment. People can still tell the difference between AI-generated content and reality. We spot the weird hands, the uncanny smoothness, the details that don’t quite land. News organizations debunk fakes. We feel like we’re staying ahead of it.
But this is temporary. In a year or two, AI-generated video will be indistinguishable from real footage. And then what?
Here’s what I think people aren’t grasping: the challenge isn’t “how do we detect AI content?” That’s the 2026 problem. The real challenge is what comes after, when detection becomes impossible.
The only way I know Coldplay is a real band is that they existed before AI did. I have pre-AI memory. I remember when they started. I’ve seen them referenced in media that predates synthetic content. That history is my anchor.
Now imagine a new band starting in 2030. How would I know they’re real? Unless I go to their concert and see them on stage, I can’t. Their music could be generated. Their interviews could be synthetic. Their social media presence could be entirely fabricated. There’s no way to verify.
And when I say I go, I mean me. I can’t trust anyone online that I don’t know personally. There won’t be a way for you to know if you’re talking to a real human via a computerized interface in a few years. Your online friends could be AI for what you know.
This applies to everything. An influencer recommending restaurants. A journalist breaking news. A newsletter you just discovered. If it started after AI became indistinguishable, you have no anchor. You can’t know.
And this is something most people can’t grasp today because they lived in the pre-AI era, and they have this anchor. Future generations won’t have it.
We’ve already lived through a version of this with fake reviews. For the last decade, we’ve learned to distrust Amazon ratings, Yelp scores, app store reviews. We developed heuristics. We looked for patterns.
But that was humans writing fake reviews at a human scale. Now imagine AI generating reviews at a scale we can’t comprehend. Every product, every restaurant, every service flooded with synthetic opinions indistinguishable from real ones. The heuristics break. Trust collapses.
The same thing will happen to media, to news, to social networks, to everything online.
A lot of trust today is based on consensus. We trust something because many people trust it. But when bots can outnumber people, consensus becomes meaningless. Popularity becomes a metric that anyone can manufacture.
So what’s left?
Physical presence. Meeting someone in person. Attending a concert. Being there.
Real life becomes the last trust anchor. The thing that can’t be faked (at least until humanoid robots become indistinguishable too, but that’s a problem for later).
Here’s what haunts me: in two generations, no one alive will remember what was pre-AI. The generational memory dies. A teenager in 2050 won’t know that The New York Times existed before AI and is therefore trustable because run by humans (I can imagine it’d still be the case). They won’t have the anchor I have. Everything in their world will be post-AI, and nothing online will be verifiable.
They’ll have to assume everything is fake. That’s the default. And building trust from that baseline is something we’ve never had to do before.
I don’t have a solution. But I think we’re in a narrow window where we still remember what “real” meant. That memory is more valuable than we realize.
Once again, plenty to think about and debate.