Recently, I watched Heat for the first time (late, I know). While I was completely absorbed by the downtown shootout, as well as by by many other scenes, I never believed any of it was real, or had ever happened exactly that way. That experience resonnated with the “dead internet” idea I've discovered recently and to the risks that come with hyper‑realistic, AI‑generated video.

In a movie theater, it doesn’t matter how real the images look, some part of the brain knows they’re fabricated. “Not true” here simply means the situations on screen didn’t unfold in the world as depicted. And often, films hit hardest not when the image is most realistic but when the story and direction capture something essentially human.

Furthermore, most of us aren't going to watch a movie to see real events but for entertainment or to be amazed by the technical aspects of the creation (for the most technical ones). It'sike a contract made, we agree to "trust" the director in order to bring us into his world for our reasons but that contract fades away once going out of the theatre.

We seem to carry a learned mental switch that separates fiction from non‑fiction, a way to treat a film as crafted illusion and a documentary as evidence. That framing lets the brain read images as representation rather than reality.

The internet began as a place saturated with human‑made photos and videos of real life. That signal has been eroding with the professionalization of creators and is poised to break further with the rise of generated images and video. Most of us “know” that not everything online is true, yet in practice our brains still grant much of what we see a presumption of truth. It’s a habit we may need to unlearn and make it fast.

I recently came across a research claiming that machine‑generated articles are overtaking human‑written ones. There’s little reason to think images and video won’t follow. As feeds fill with synthetic media, especially for younger audiences, we may learn a new default: the internet as a theater for AI, where most things are staged and therefore not inherently true. At that point, opening an app might trigger the same mental dissociation we reserve for movies, applied to nearly everything on our screens.

The open question is whether trusted zones will emerge online, spaces where images and video are verified as authentic or whether trust will shift to different networks, or even offline. Or perhaps, as with television, the lines will blur but within clearer, organized systems of labeling and accountability.

eyesobscura.

PS: Of course the image is generated, Fortnite's galaxy skin came long after Heat was released. Original image comes from the movie.