Authenticity Through Wool Sweaters in the Rain

The AI influencer Lea staged a world that was both idealized and close to reality. That’s how her builders described it. The sentence kept me thinking for a while. Not because it’s wrong. But because it doesn’t notice what it’s saying.

Lea wore wool sweaters when it rained. She sat in cafes that looked like real cafes. Her apartment was tidy but not perfect. She looked like someone you might know. The builders call this authenticity.

Authenticity means something is real. That there’s a match between what someone shows and what someone is. The wool sweater in the rain is supposed to simulate that match. It’s supposed to say: Look, she’s like you. She gets cold too.

Lea doesn’t get cold. Lea is an image file. She has no body temperature. She has no sense of cold. She has no closet where the wool sweater hangs. The sweater is a data point in a strategy designed to create closeness.

The word authenticity has had a strange career over the past ten years. It went from being the opposite of staging to becoming a tool of staging. On Instagram, authenticity is an aesthetic. There are filters for it. Presets that make images look as if they haven’t been edited. Naturalness as a style. Realness as a design choice.

Lea is the logical continuation of that. If authenticity is an aesthetic, then an AI can execute it better than a human. Because the AI never forgets to be authentic. Because she never breaks character. Because she never has moments where she’s real in a way that doesn’t fit the brand.

Lea’s design decisions were precisely calculated. What clothes she wears. What settings she appears in. How her smile is calibrated. Close enough to reality to build trust. Far enough from reality to stay aspirational. The corridor between the two is narrow. An algorithm navigates it better than a person.

I think about the people who follow Lea. Some know she’s an AI. Others maybe not. But even those who know respond to the wool sweater. They respond to the familiar. To the feeling: She’s like me. And that feeling is no less real just because its trigger is generated.

That’s the hard part. The emotion is real. The trigger isn’t. And the question of whether that’s okay isn’t easy to answer.

What bothers me about this story isn’t that Lea exists. It’s how she gets presented. With pride. With enthusiasm for the finesse of the deception. Look how authentic she seems. The wool sweater was a brilliant decision. The builders admire the craftsmanship. They don’t ask what damage it does.

Authenticity through wool sweaters in the rain. It sounds harmless. It’s a detail. But in that detail there’s a shift that’s bigger than Lea.

If authenticity no longer means that something is real, but that something seems real, then we’ve lost the word. And with the word, the ability to name the difference. If everything seems authentic, how do you still say that something actually is real?

The wool sweater in the rain. A human puts it on because they’re cold. Lea wears it because someone decided that cold creates closeness.

The difference is invisible. That’s the problem.