What happens when anyone can fake anything?
The faker becomes worthless. The authenticator becomes essential.
AI collapsed mastery into automation. It erased the pride of skill and made illusion infinite.
𝟭. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗗𝗶𝗲𝗱
Illusion used to require labor.
Render farms. Compositors obsessing over every pixel. Supervisors checking every frame. That labor made fake expensive. And expensive meant valuable.
AI made illusion abundant.
Anyone can generate a fake explosion. A fake face. A fake world. When abundance kills price, the producer loses leverage.
𝟮. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀
Judgment.
Taste.
Curation.
Trust.
Studios will still pay. But not for pixels.
They'll pay for people who can tell which pixels to keep. Who can see what reads as real and what breaks belief. Who understand structure deeply enough to authenticate at scale.
That's the job AI can't automate (somebody has to).
𝟯. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗥𝗼𝗹𝗲
The VFX industry isn't collapsing.
It's mutating from a production economy to a credibility economy.
If everyone can fake, the one who can authenticate wins. If everyone can render, the one who can see truthfully becomes indispensable.
That's reality brokerage.
Managing what's real enough. Directing belief in a world of infinite fabrication. Being the arbiter of the believable.
The compositor who understands why light behaves a certain way will always matter more than the one who just runs the script.
The artist who knows which shadow breaks immersion will outlast the one who renders everything and hopes.
Mastery didn't die. It just moved.
From making illusion to managing it.
Fakeness won. Now somebody has to manage it.
And some of us still know how to see.
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