I found the sentence in an industry report on AI-generated content, tucked between conversion rates and engagement metrics: perceived value matters more than physical reality. Nobody at the company that wrote it flagged it as unusual.

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as its word of the year. The term named a shift in politics, where a claim’s emotional pull counted for more than its accuracy. The choice read as a warning about public debate, a signal that persuasion had come loose from the facts it was supposed to serve.

Ten years later, the same idea sits in a business report, and nobody objects. The difference is the audience. Politics claims to answer to facts. Business built its own accepted gap between perception and reality long ago, and gave it a name: marketing. A burger in an advertisement looks larger, glossier and better assembled than the burger that lands in the customer’s hand at the counter. Customers have learned to discount the photo before they open the box.

AI generation removes the requirement that an advertised object exist at all. A generated influencer with millions of followers has no person behind the face. A photo of a coastal town at golden hour sells a trip to a place nobody built. A five-star review praises a product its author never touched. Behind the burger photo there was still an actual burger in a studio. Behind the influencer, the photo and the review there is only the output.

The economics explain why the report treats this as routine. A generated image costs a fraction of a photoshoot, and it often draws the higher engagement rate. Perceived value beats physical reality on the balance sheet, and the report recorded the win the way it recorded every other metric on the page. Companies building these systems can read that sentence as a strategy note.

The report’s numbers are accurate. That is exactly why nobody asks the question those numbers make available: whether an economy in which reality is optional is a good one to build. The 2016 alarm assumed a lie would eventually catch up with the liar. Ten years on, a report can state the opposite as a line item and clear internal review at whatever company wrote it.

I don’t know where this leads. The reports treat the question as settled.