The New Discernment: Sensing Reality When AI Can Fake Everything

You can’t trust anything online anymore. AI can deepfake anything. But art forgery and the surprising wisdom of Pickup Artists can help us develop a better way to discern what’s real.

1. AI is Erasing Our Ability to Discern Truth

AI has mastered and is now perfecting the art of imitation. The digital symbols we've come to trust as representations of reality are now being weaponized against us in increasingly sophisticated ways.

It was a late Tuesday afternoon when Jordan’s phone buzzed on his desk. The screen displayed his wife’s name—“Elena.” His heart skipped a beat as he answered immediately.

“Jordan? It’s Elena,” came a panicked voice. She was frantic, as if every second mattered.

“Elena? What’s wrong?” he asked.

“There’s no time, Jordan. I-I’m in trouble. They’ve got me. Please, you have to help,” the voice pleaded, words tumbling over each other. The background noise was indistinct, a jumble of muffled sounds that sounded like a busy street.

“What!? What do you mean? Where are you?” he asked.

The voice hesitated before continuing, “I can’t say, but listen—we need $5,000 in cash, delivered to the old warehouse on Maple Street in less than an hour. If you don’t... if you don’t do it, I’ll be hurt. Jordan, please… I’m so scared,” Elena sobbed.

In that moment, his rational mind was completely short-circuited. Any questions that might save him from a scam vanish. Instead, his sole focus is the need to do whatever it takes to rescue Elena.

Jordan’s experience is one out of thousands of similar stories that have cropped up in the past couple of years. Voice and video clones powered by AI—of you, family members, or friends—are used to run sophisticated scams, bypassing not only our ability to think under pressure and stress, but bypassing identity verification used by banks and institutions.

AI can do this because everything online (and digital) is fundamentally symbolic. Every image you see online, every video, every social media post—these aren't reality, as much as our minds are tricked into thinking they are. They're icons pointing to reality.

That phone call that sounds like your spouse? That FaceTime call where you see their face? That text message from a friend? Your Instagram chat history? It’s not real. It’s a stream of signals, colored pixels, binary code, soundwaves, and database entries rendered as text. All of it can be useful. But absolutely none of it is real.

Your screen, filled with illusions, simply mediates reality through digital symbols and is widely available (and used) for manipulation.

The difference between the "reality" of a photo, text, audio, video, and AI-generated equivalents have disappeared, and AI models are only improving. Soon, most of what you see online will be made by various AI models and you’ll have no idea it is.

You’ll see loved ones committing unspeakable crimes on video—but it won’t be them. You’ll hear and see friends say batshit crazy things on social media—but it won’t actually be them. You’ll “like” and comment on “photos” of sunsets, mountains, flowers, and steak dinners—but none of it is from the real world. You’ll watch videos of humans doing silly things for hours on end—but it’ll all be AI-generated people.

We’re unprepared for this. We don’t know what to do about it. And very few see it coming.

Some are suggesting that you use “discernment” to perceive and recognize what’s real versus fake. They’ll tell you to look for the extra fingers, the out-of-place objects, the blurry strands of hair that bend unnaturally, and use an AI detector. None of it works and it’s getting harder and harder to tell, and soon it’ll be impossible. AI models can already generate flawless text, images, audio, and video.

Our current understanding of discernment can’t handle this because it’s dangerously flawed. It favors logic, epistemology, rationality, and discredits our human senses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing.

True, and useful, discernment in the Age of AI requires us to rely on Impressionism, funny enough.

Paradoxically, you don’t need to “sharpen your attention” and look extra hard for the extra finger or missing teeth. You need to expand your attention (our senses play into this, as you’ll see), experience the Impressionism of the moment, identify what frames are present—so you can reformulate them. This is a different, more ancient form of attention that hardly anyone talks about.

Where do we start with this? Obviously, we need to start with Pickup Artists.

2. Pickup Artists and Frames

Whenever we’re talking to a man, woman, child, friend, colleague, enemy—we’re dealing in conversational “frames”, which are mental structures or lenses through which we interpret and engage in social interactions.

A frame can represent a particular way of perceiving the situation—whether it’s playful, flirtatious, confident, or even defensive—and suggests a corresponding set of responses.

As humans, we naturally align with and follow whatever frame is present in an engagement. We accept the premise, and follow the frame.

A frame is the shared context or set of expectations that shapes how people interpret and respond. It sets the stage, guiding the tone, roles, and underlying assumptions that influence communication.

Instead of accepting and following frames, we need to get better at shifting and reforming frames.

You know who’s weirdly good at that? Pickup Artists (PUA for short).

This phenomenon refers to individuals and groups that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, who developed and shared techniques aimed at attracting romantic partners. This often involved specific conversational scripts, psychological tactics, and behavioral strategies. I think it reached its peak with the book The Game by Neil Strauss and I don’t know what became of the whole thing. These individuals and groups may still exist but it’s well past its heyday and popularity.

Regardless, they were obsessed with frame-making, typically for romantic and sexual conquest.

But disregarding their preferred goals, they got the universal mechanics of frames down to a science.

I once heard a self-appointed PUA describe how he interacts with someone and it’s stuck with me for years:

“Whenever I talk to a girl, I imagine a cloud above me with all the things I could do, or say, to move the conversation forward. I pick whatever the situation calls for, out of the cloud, and use it.”

Discernment is something like perceiving the situation you’re in, and choosing one way to engage with it in the moment, out of the myriad of things you could do or say. That is, you’re seeing the frame (or multiple frames) present in the moment and choose a different frame.

It’s worth keeping in mind that frames aren’t static. They shift depending on the context; what might be an appropriate frame in a relaxed, social setting might not work in a more formal or emotionally charged situation. Hearing your panicked spouse scream about a ransom over the phone is a bit more intense than talking to a barista and getting recommendations on what latte flavor you should try.

With this in mind, discernment is the ability to read many potential frames accurately and then decide on the most appropriate way to act. It’s about having the attentional and cognitive flexibility to notice, pay attention, switch frames, break out of a default mode, form a new frame, and sometimes combine elements from different frames to suit the particular moment.

This is different from what most people think it is and how discernment has been framed in the discussions around AI deepfakes.

We think discernment is something we only need for detecting scams and distinguishing real from fake, true from false. But as technology pushes us toward ever-faster reactions with no time to stop and think. We scroll. We like. We share, tap, watch clips, scan headlines. We barely think. Social media rewires our neural pathways to react, not reflect.

The problem runs deeper than smartphones and social media, though. It's rooted in modern philosophy's blind spots about human consciousness, an assumption that all technology is neutral (it only matters how it’s used), and that all technological progress is good.

That’s not entirely true or accurate. And it won’t help us distinguish between true reality and AI-generated world simulations.

How do we handle this?

And how does this play out at a time when AI has flipped our frame of reality on its head? Can you really trust what you see and hear when AI can generate a flawless replica of your spouse’s voice?

3. The New Discernment is Awareness Shifting

Real discernment works on two levels at once and it’s a process, not a single event.

The discernment process involves a constant balancing act between Situational Awareness (the immediate situation you’re in) and Contextual Awareness (the broader background or long-term patterns a situation is happening within).

First, there's what's happening right now—the immediate situation with all its details, feelings, and urgency. This is Situational Awareness—our immediate perception and understanding of the present moment, with all its sensory inputs, emotional resonances, and immediate implications.

Then there's the bigger picture—the patterns and histories that give meaning to the moment. This is Contextual Awareness—our broader understanding of patterns, histories, and potential futures that frame the present moment.

You can visualize it as something like this:

True discernment happens when you’re present and paying attention to the Situational and the Contextual. At its core, discernment operates as a dynamic interplay between two distinct but interconnected modes of awareness.

This changes how we see and experience everything. Discernment becomes more like something I call the Impressionist's Paradox: sometimes you understand things better by stepping back and letting the patterns emerge naturally. Think of Monet's water lilies. Up close, they're just patches of color. Step back, and suddenly you see the whole pond.

The Impressionist painters knew something important. Instead of painting every detail perfectly, they captured the feeling of light and color. They showed how immediate sensation could reveal deeper truth. This mirrors how real discernment works. We need both sharp detail and soft focus. The details in technology have become hyper-salient, so we need to squint, change our focus, and see the larger context.

Speaking of Impressionism, this reminds me of Claudia, one of the leading experts on art forgery, trained at two of the most prestigious art academies in the world. Claudia is not her real name. Given the nature of her work, she prefers to be anonymous.

4. The New Discernment is also Impressionistic, Not Factual

I had spent a few months fine-tuning an image model to paint like Rembrandt. World-class experts, like Claudia, have a hard time distinguishing between what’s made by a human versus made by AI. In some cases, AI even claims a painting by Renaissance master Raphael is not a forgery—but experts disagree.

After examining a photograph of a supposed Rembrandt, she said:

“This is either an unknown Rembrandt, or you’re a very good forger.”

Claudia looked up and put the magnifying glass to the side. She glanced at me. Then back to the photograph.

“I can introduce you to a few important collectors and specialists if you’d like.”

The fluorescent lights flickered overhead as Claudia spread the analysis reports across her desk—spectrographic readings, infrared scans, historical documentation. "Ten years ago, this would have been enough." She pushed the papers aside and stood up.

Claudia walked to the window, looking out at the morning traffic. "The microscope lies sometimes," she said. "Or rather, it tells a truth so narrow that it becomes a kind of lie."

This is the modernist trap we've fallen into: believing that truth is always found through reduction and analysis, a narrowing of scope, rather than synthesis and experience. We've inherited an epistemological framework that privileges quantifiable data over qualitative understanding, technical analysis over embodied knowledge. The scientific method, invaluable in its proper domain, has led us to discount other forms of knowing.

This is where our current approach to discernment fails. You narrow your scope, remaining immersed and fixed in the Situation of trying to discern if the image of your spouse blowing someone’s head off is real or not—so you look for that extra finger, the missing teeth, the blurry strands of hair—anything that will reveal it’s an AI fake.

But you can’t anymore. You have to shift your awareness, your attention, and look elsewhere.

"People think I'm looking at brush strokes," Claudia said, returning to her desk. "But what I'm really doing is learning to see." She picked up one of the technical reports and folded it into a paper airplane. "These tell me what's there. They don't tell me what's missing."

When Claudia works to discern whether a piece of art is a fake or forgery, one thing she pays extra attention to is the storage history. If the Rembrandt has been stored where they say it has (like forgotten in an attic in Spain for many years), the discerning question is:

What environmental evidence on specific paint and the canvas and frame as a whole should, and should not be, present?

She’s looking at the Situational (the artpiece) and the Contextual (environment).

She’s taking in the particular and the whole, immersed in the impression of it all. And it’s an intentionally practiced attention that helps her shift the awareness back and forth, rejecting the frame of typical art forgery tactics in favor of a new frame altogether.

That is, her attention does the heavy-lifting.

5. The Practice of Attention

I’m sure you’ve heard of practicing your attention muscles. As much of a cliche as it is, it’s true.

Our attention has atrophied while we’ve been staring at screens, mistaking digital signals for reality. But it’s still there, waiting to be strengthened.

Your eyes can detect subtle shifts in expression that 4K video flattens into pixels. Your ears can hear layers of vocal resonance that digital sampling reduces to waveforms. Your skin can feel micro-changes in air pressure. Your nose can detect thousands of molecular combinations. Your attention is best used and practiced through your body and senses.

To practice your attention, you start with the mundane. See how morning light hits your coffee cup—not as an Instagram moment, but as direct experience. Feel the ceramic's temperature change as the coffee cools. Watch steam patterns shift in the air.

Listen to your partner's breathing when they sleep, not through a sleep-tracking app, but with your own ears in a shared space. Notice how your child's hand feels in yours, not as a memory to post on Instagram, but as a moment of engagement. Watch how sunlight transforms your walls throughout the day, not as timelapse content, but as an immersive experience.

This is how you strengthen your attention (and as an effect, your ability to discern). Each moment of direct attention is training. Every instance of choosing presence over digital convenience makes your attention stronger.

You'll face AI clones of your loved ones soon enough. They'll sample your spouse's voice patterns, map your mother's facial expressions, and replicate your child's laugh. They'll mine your digital history to reference your inside jokes, reconstruct shared memories, simulate the rhythms of your relationships.

But your practiced attention will feel the emptiness behind the simulation.

And that enhanced attention will improve your ability to discern.

6. Using AI for Human Discernment

Paradoxically, we can use AI to develop our discernment capabilities. Imagine "reality drill", exercises where AI generates increasingly sophisticated synthetic content, challenging you to identify what's fake and not.

These exercises would progress from obvious forgeries to sophisticated simulations, training your perception to notice increasingly subtle inconsistencies. The AI tool would provide feedback not as a simple "right/wrong" but as a guide to what markers you might have missed.

Imagine using an “AI Vibe Search” tool. In traditional search, we look for facts, figures, and direct matches. But human discernment operates largely on what we might call "vibes" which are those intuitive, hard-to-articulate sensations that something feels right, wrong or different. Your senses and your body detects them even if your logic or left hemisphere can’t quite put words on them.

And imagine an “AI Semantic Constellations” tool that creates a "constellation" of how a person or organization's language has evolved, showing clusters of related terms, emotional tones, and contextual markers across time. When a new message arrives, it places it within this constellation, allowing you to see immediately if it falls within the expected pattern or represents an anomalous shift.

Over the past few years, I’ve developed AI tools like these to help strengthen my attention and discernment. They’ve proven not only helpful but invaluable, as AI models erase all boundaries between the fake and the real.

Over time, deliberate practice of your attention and discernment would develop what some neuroscientists call "perceptual expertise", which is the ability to recognize patterns at a glance, without conscious analysis. This is precisely the kind of impressionistic perception that is true discernment.

You as a human apply Situational and Contextual Awareness and Impressionistic sensing to make the final determination.

No one is going to win a technological arms race against fake content. But we can win by deepening our full engagement with the reality that surrounds us.

AI, properly used, doesn't corrupt authentic human experience. AI can actually help us return to it, with expanded awareness and heightened discernment. There's an irony here. AI can actually help us improve and use more of our senses. Not by replacing them with something better but by extending our senses in new ways.

There’s a mixture of art and science involved. Perhaps science does well with some Situational Awareness (at least to some extent) but you need Impressionism, art, to shift into a Contextual Awareness.

7. The Art and Science of Discernment

The solution to AI deepfakes and the fake reality we increasingly find ourselves in isn't better digital security, watermarking, AI detectors, or stronger passwords.

The solution is simpler but harder:

Return to the full experience of reality, with full attention, via your senses, for true discernment—with technology and AI in its proper use.

I met Claudia at an art gallery where she was analyzing a controversial painting using spectrographic tools. She spent twenty years learning to trust machines before returning to her senses.

Now she reads paintings through trained perception, like you must learn to “read” the frame of reality, so you can shift your awareness and discern more accurately.

As we left the gallery, Claudia turned to me with a knowing smile. "People think I'm some kind of technical expert," she said. "I just learned to pay attention."

Talk again soon,
Samuel Woods
The Bionic Writer