There is growing concern that the proliferation of generative AI will remove humans from the equation of creativity because eventually most art will be AI-generated images based on previous AI-generated images until all art is simulacra with no connection to reality. But in a way, this has already happened—before the invention of AI art.

Consider storytelling mediums such as novels, TV, and movies. Even though they are (for now) written by humans, most often those human writers are not basing their work on reality, on true human experiences. They’re basing their perception of reality on the TV and movies they consume and the social media feeds they follow. This is why so much modern entertainment rings hollow. Good art portrays truth, but people’s perception of truth has become distorted by media. Hence modern artists produce, at best, distortions of truth, if not outright fantasies. (And not the good kind of fantasy, as J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional stories are full of deep truths.)

Most people today live in the simulated world of media (social, news, and entertainment) more than they experience the real world directly. Even when in physical reality with other humans, people are simultaneously in simulated reality on their smartphones. The “real” world is fake. We scroll Instagram while eating instant dinners. Our selfies are filtered with artificial intelligence; our food is full of artificial ingredients. So when modern artists attempt to reflect the real world in their work, there is rarely anything real about it. Most fictional storytelling today is not based on reality at all; it is pure simulacra based on simulacra—stories based on fictional stories instead of stories based on truth.

This problem is perhaps most alarming in modern Hollywood where they are not even pretending to tell original stories anymore. They are simply remaking older stories with the same names and characters, just new faces in the roles (or the same faces, only older). Movie studios take classic fairy tales that were previously based on timeless truths and rewrite them to match present politics. Good art is realer than reality. But modern “art” has become fabrications with no connection to reality—or to the truth of human nature. As a result, most human-made fiction today—novels, movies, and TV shows—is not true art, it is artifice.

People on social media do not portray themselves as they truly are, but as they wish others to see them. Likewise, Hollywood writers do not portray the world as it is, but as they wish it to be. I am less worried about the coming onslaught of AI artifice than the human artifice that already exists.