The writer is the Director of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and a curator-historian.
One of the stranger side effects of modern image culture is that we're starting to doubt the extraordinary. When we see an incredible landscape, a stunning face, or a photo of an animal doing something unlikely, our first thought isn't just how remarkable it is, but whether it's even real. More often than not, we're asking: Is this AI? There's a little sadness in this shift. No, a lot in fact. Not because images were ever entirely trustworthy, but because doubt is becoming our default way of looking.
Although art has been tricking us for centuries. From Renaissance painters creating the illusion of three-dimensionality on flat surfaces, to trompe-l'oeil tricks that deceive the eye. Photography has always involved framing, selecting, and excluding. Cinema makes movement from still images. Surrealism gave form to impossible things. Artists have long reminded us that seeing doesn’t necessarily mean believing. Maybe representation was never the same as reality in the first place.
What feels different now is not just that images can be manipulated; we've known this for a while, but that the subject of the image might never have existed at all. The landscape might never have been visited, the portrait might have no sitter, the photo might never have been taken, the voice might never have spoken, the moment might never have happened.
Because of this, verifying what we see has become such an effort. It’s a reversal: art used to teach us to question images; now, perhaps, it’s teaching us how to live with doubt without losing trust altogether. The danger isn't just believing falsehoods; it's also losing faith in what is true. An extraordinary photo can be dismissed as fake; a remarkable human performance might seem suspicious because it’s too perfect, and evidence can be questioned because fabrications are easier than ever.
So, the problem with synthetic culture isn't just about falsehoods feeling more believable; it’s that reality itself seems more fragile and deniable. And along with that, something far more sad may be disappearing: wonder.
Wonder requires us to be willing to believe, not blindly, but enough to be surprised. Yet today, extraordinary images often trigger our forensic instincts before our emotional reactions. We examine fingers, hunt for inconsistencies, scrutinise shadows, read comments for confirmation. We used to ask, “How did they do that?” Now, we’re asking, “Did anyone do that at all?”
This shift might also reveal something about our idea of authenticity. A photograph isn’t necessarily reality simply because someone pressed the shutter. Someone chose where to stand, what to include or exclude, shaping the image we see. Portraits can construct identities, not just reveal them. Perhaps, the real distinction isn’t between real and fake, but between something genuinely experienced and something merely generated.
That’s where art gets interesting. When we look at a painting, we know it’s constructed, yet we see the evidence of brushstrokes, changes of mind, mistakes and lingering traces of time. For most of history, that human touch was obvious and needed no explanation; soon, it might even add to a work’s value. We will find ourselves drawn more and more to fingerprints, brushstrokes, handwriting, imperfections, analogue photographs, live performances. Such things that carry evidence of being made by hand because they reassure us that someone was there. Maybe humanity itself is becoming a kind of provenance.
But that doesn’t mean we should romanticise everything handmade or assume human authorship makes art better. Humans have produced terrible art with sincerity, and machines aren’t responsible for mediocrity. Unfortunately, it is we.
The more complex question is what happens when uncertainty becomes permanent. Art has always asked us to navigate the space between belief and doubt. We can be moved by a painting, even though we know it’s an illusion. We can see a photograph without insisting that it’s the absolute truth. We can encounter fiction while sensing that something emotionally real might still be happening. Perhaps this kind of looking is what we need more of, by believing without blind faith, doubting without automatic disbelief.
Because the bleakest outcome of synthetic culture might not be a world filled with fakes, but that we might lose the ability to believe in truly remarkable things when they happen in front of us.
