When did we become so afraid of being wrong that we stopped allowing ourselves to be human?

It is a Tuesday or perhaps a Thursday; the distinction hardly matters in the infinite depths of the algorithm. Time dilates when you slip into the dissociative trance of doomscrolling. One moment, you’re watching someone recreate a Zara Larsson makeup look, the next, a student is dancing to varying cortisol levels, and immediately after, you’re viewing shaky footage of an airstrike in West Asia.

In a habitual attempt to maintain a streak, I send my year-and-a-half-long situationship a TikTok. It’s a video of a building reduced into pulverized concrete, a billion fragments swirling at torrential speed. Children, looking agonizingly like prey, scrambled through the ruins to evade a mechanized aerial predator. The comment section, a warzone of its own, says it is in Gaza.

I expect such tragedy to bridge the physical distance between our screens, hoping it might elicit, if not grief, then at least a shared sympathy. Instead, he replies: “AI slop man yan.” 

He is neither cruel nor cynical. I know him well enough to say that he has the instinctive mercy of a decent human being. It takes little effort for him to hand a hundred-peso bill to a beggar or stop in his tracks to pet a passing stray cat. He does not have to try to be kind.

Yet, his sympathy, like that of billions of people in the digital age, has been intercepted by a barricade of preemptive digital doubt. In the frantic effort to outsmart AI-generated media, the postmodern mind has conditioned itself to inspect everything that it sees.

When confronted with images of immense suffering, we no longer gasp, flinch, or weep in an instant. We zoom. We count the fingers of a grief-stricken mother. We scan the street signs with an illegible script that belongs to no living tongue. We study the anomalous features of a displaced child’s face, and the choreography of ammunition that seems to mock the laws of physics.

Only once it passes the inspection do we allow ourselves the luxury of grief.

Empathy is an abdication of the ego, a willingness to inhabit the unresolved reality of another. So when a deepfake succeeds in wringing a tear from our eyes, the subsequent realization of its falsity leaves behind a bitter resentment. We are left with the sense that our vulnerability has been violated and the intimate conditions under which we allow ourselves to feel have been taken advantage of.

There is a scalding embarrassment that accompanies the realization that a prompt has pranked your highest faculties for feeling. It renders your grief foolish. The internet, with its unforgiving audience, magnifies every bit of that foolishness until you feel like the punchline of a chronically online joke. It seems that more than we want to be empathetic, no one wants to be the gullible fool. 

For the sake of self-preservation, we have erected a psychological barrier—a newly evolved defense mechanism designed to protect us from investing our emotions in AI-generated media. We simply cannot bear the exhaustion of grieving every fabricated lie that crosses our newsfeed. Hence, we have become accustomed to staring at a screen riddled with brutality, searching for the glitch that proves none of it is real. Yet, in the process of guarding ourselves from deception, we risk becoming complicit in the erasure of real suffering.

Artificial intelligence is an engine of probability, trained on the bleeding dataset of human history. It has ingested millions of circumstantial media from Gaza, Tehran, Khartoum, and Kyiv. It has learned to synthesize such data into a statistically probable scheme of pixels. If it conjures a hyper-realistic image of a bombed-out neighborhood, it does so only because tens of thousands of real photographs have taught it how to. If it renders the blood-streak face of a toddler, it’s because that specific agony exists in terrifying abundance. 

Somewhere in the world right now, a toddler is pinned beneath a billion fragments of pulverized concrete. I don’t know her name. I don’t know if the video of her has been posted yet, or if it will be, or if the person filming it is still alive to upload it. I don’t know if she’s alive, but if she is, I wonder if she is looking into the phone’s camera, thinking if anyone will actually believe she is real. 

What I do know is that her reality is not up for debate.

While we wait for evidence that the video is real, the victims do not pause to acknowledge our doubt. The airstrikes do not wait for our verdict. It simply happens in real time on a Tuesday or perhaps a Thursday to people whose agony is so historically real that even data centers could not help but absorb it.

Beneath a real sky, a real family is being buried in the ruins of their living room. A real mother stands before a row of real bodies and recognizes her daughter only by the yellow flowers on a dress she bought days ago. A real grandfather sits in the wreckage of the home he spent forty years building. Real exhausted doctors are weeping over real bodies too small for the shrouds they are wrapped in. Real blood is soaking into real earth.

I look back at his message: “AI slop man yan.” He is neither cruel nor cynical. He is just tired. We are all so unbelievably tired. Evolution has wired us to care for a village, a tribe at most, but now, we are asked to elicit grief beyond our biological threshold. Our nervous system was not designed to process the aggregate suffering of billions of people, let alone filter it in the ocean of algorithmic lies. 

It is easier to write off an atrocity as a simulated crisis than to accept the excruciating reality that we are witnessing our fellow human beings being eradicated in high definition. If everything isn’t real, we are absolved of the moral responsibility to grieve. If everything isn’t real, we grant ourselves the comfort of an undisturbed conscience.

The algorithm erects such a barricade by bombarding us with more tragedy than we can process, but it is our retreat into apathy that cements it in place. Disbelief may feel like a massive relief, but it does nothing to ease this exhaustion.

The only way for us to remain human is to accept that being worn out is part of staying awake in a sedating algorithm. We do not have to bleed for every tragedy that crosses our newsfeed, but we can’t let that exhaustion solidify into convenient indifference. Once we lose the capacity to gasp, flinch, or weep, we start to resemble the lifeless things we so deeply distrust. 

We became so afraid of being wrong when we began to value our ego and comfort more than our capacity to feel. Certainty has never been the prerequisite to our humanity. In fact, we have allowed ourselves to be moved by things we knew weren’t real.

We’ve let our eyes well up over a wedding in a fast-food commercial. We’ve felt our throats lump up over the death of a dog in a movie we knew was make-believe. We’ve even grieved over toys left behind when their owner goes off to college. We’ve never needed assurance to feel the imaginary, the fleeting, or the mundane. So why, when the stakes are highest, do we suddenly stop our faculties for feeling from doing the one thing they were made for?

We have to accept the risk of being wrong because the alternative isn’t being right, but feeling nothing at all.

If empathy is the abdication of the ego, then we must at least reclaim the courage to be the gullible fool. We must bear the scalding embarrassment of being tricked by a prompt, if it means preserving our capacity to mourn the loss of humanity. While time dilates for us in the dissociative trance of doomscrolling, real time is mercilessly running out for lives that AI cannot regenerate. We can no longer afford to demand that the world prove its destruction before we allow ourselves to feel.