While most people I know devoted the usual portion of Thanksgiving dinner to coping with obnoxious relatives, I devoted a similar portion to trying to explain the looming threat of AI-generated film and television.

One brother-in-law just couldn’t understand why I was so worried. He kept insisting that his favorite reality-TV show was “so real” in its details, there was just no way a mere computer could create anything like it. And then he’d go on to describe a cherished scene from this show in all its surprising particularities. His son, a sharp twenty-year-old with a firm grasp of AI’s potential, said impassively, in a no-big-deal tone, “But it’ll just fake that, and you’ll never know the difference.”

These are the poles of reaction when coming to terms with our fast-approaching media dystopia: on one end, a blank refusal to accept the idea that the reality you like — even in as generally artificial and contrived a mode as reality TV — can be faked by a computer programmed to do it, and, on the other, an almost equally blank acceptance of what seems like a foregone conclusion — of course it can all be faked, and so what?