So there’s this woman named Samantha Floreani who’s written a piece about becoming an unwilling AI detective, and honestly, I felt that in my bones. Not the good kind of feeling you get from the third bourbon either. The bad kind. The kind that makes you realize you’re spending your finite time on this rotating rock playing spot-the-fake with videos of pickles in car chases.
Let me back up. A friend sends Floreani a video of a guy dressed as a pickle doing some Fast and Furious nonsense on the highway. They laugh. Good times, right? Except it’s not real. It’s AI-generated. And when Floreani points this out, her friend—who’s apparently pretty good at catching these things—gets frustrated. “I hate having to be on the constant lookout for AI trash,” she says.
Yeah. Me too, sister.
The thing is, this isn’t the dystopia anyone ordered. We were promised flying cars and moon bases. Instead, we got a job nobody applied for: Full-time Bullshit Inspector. No salary, no benefits, just the creeping sense that you can’t trust anything you see anymore, and if you spend too much time trying to figure out what’s real, the algorithm punishes you by showing you more fake garbage.
It’s like being trapped in a casino where even the slot machines are lying to you about being slot machines.
Floreain runs through the usual litany of generative AI sins—theft of creative labor, environmental destruction, exploited workers, productivity theater—and she’s right about all of it. But then she gets to what might be the most honest observation in the whole piece: it’s just downright irritating.
Not world-ending. Not apocalyptic. Just annoying as hell.
And that’s the part nobody talks about enough. We’re all so busy debating the existential implications of artificial intelligence that we forget to mention how much it just sucks to live in a world where you can’t take anything at face value anymore. Where every video requires a forensic analysis. Where the simple act of watching a stupid pickle video becomes an exercise in epistemological uncertainty.
Here’s where it gets really perverse though. The more time you spend trying to figure out if something’s AI-generated, the more of that content the algorithm serves you. You’re watching the video multiple times, looking for the telltale glitches—the extra fingers, the weird physics, the uncanny valley face movements. Maybe you leave a comment. Maybe you share it with a friend saying “This is definitely AI, right?” And every single one of those interactions is screaming to the platform’s algorithm: “MORE PICKLE CONTENT, PLEASE.”
You hate it, so you engage with it, so you get more of it, so you hate it more, so you engage with it more. It’s an ouroboros of irritation, except the snake is made of spam and its own tail tastes like disappointment.
Floreani name-drops Baudrillard and his concept of hyperreality—the collapse of the distinction between reality and simulation. Which is fancy talk for “nothing means anything anymore and we’re all just floating in a soup of lies.” Baudrillard died in 2007, which means he missed the full flowering of his predictions. Lucky bastard.
But here’s what gets me: I can almost understand the deepfakes with political agendas or the revenge porn or whatever other horrible uses people put this technology to. I don’t support it, but the motivation is clear. Power, money, cruelty—the usual suspects.
What I can’t wrap my head around is the sheer inanity of most AI content. A pickle in a car chase. Seriously? Why does this exist? What cosmic purpose does it serve?
The answer, as always, comes down to money. Jason Koebler, a journalist Floreani quotes, argues that this content isn’t even designed for humans. It’s designed for algorithms. The content itself is irrelevant—it could be pickles or politics or puppies or whatever. What matters is volume. Spam the platform, see what gets engagement, iterate, repeat, cash the check.
It’s content for content’s sake. Form divorced from meaning. Signifiers without signifieds. And I’m using all these grad school words because sometimes when reality gets this stupid, you need fancy language just to process it.
The platforms could stop this. They won’t. Why would they? Engagement is engagement. A view is a view. Whether you’re watching a real video or a fake one doesn’t matter to their ad revenue. Actually, the fake ones might be better because they’re easier to produce at scale.
We’re all just numbers in a spreadsheet somewhere, and the spreadsheet doesn’t care if we’re engaging with reality or hallucinations. The line goes up either way.
Floreani wonders if she’s being stubborn by wanting to hold onto reality. If caring whether something is real or fake still matters. And honestly, that question hit me harder than it should have. Because yeah, maybe it is stubborn. Maybe we’re the last generation that gives a damn about the difference between authentic and artificial. Maybe in twenty years, kids will look at us the way we look at people who insist on vinyl records—cute, but ultimately pointless.
But I’m not ready to let go yet. Call me old-fashioned, call me a dinosaur, call me whatever you want. I still think reality matters. I still think the difference between a real video and a generated one is important, even if it’s just a video of something stupid.
Because once you stop caring about that distinction, what’s left? We’re already drowning in a sea of content designed to manipulate our attention and extract our money. The least we can do is try to figure out which parts of that ocean are water and which parts are just more garbage.
So yeah, I’m keeping the detective hat. The magnifying glass too. Not because I wanted this job, but because somebody’s got to do it. Even if the only thing we’re investigating is whether a pickle in a car chase is real or not.
Especially if it’s a pickle in a car chase.
Because that’s where we are now. That’s the timeline we’re living in. A world where you need to be a forensic analyst just to scroll through your feed. A world where distinguishing reality from simulation has become a full-time unpaid gig. A world where the platforms benefit from the confusion and the chaos, so there’s zero incentive for any of this to stop.
Floreani ends her piece talking about begrudgingly holding onto our magnifying glasses and deerstalker hats. And yeah, that’s about right. We’re all Sherlock Holmes now, except instead of solving murders, we’re trying to figure out if a video of a dancing cat is real or not.
The game’s afoot, I guess. Even if it’s a stupid game nobody wanted to play.
Source: Becoming an AI-detective is a job I never wanted and wish I could quit | Samantha Floreani