You're scrolling through your feed at 11 PM and see it. A video of a world leader saying something so unhinged your thumb freezes mid-swipe. Or maybe it’s a photo of a transparent deep-sea creature that looks like it was designed by a Pixar artist on mushrooms. Your brain sends a tiny spark of electricity to your logic center, and you whisper: Can this be real? Honestly, it’s the defining question of our decade. We are living in a post-truth playground where our eyes have started lying to us, and the gap between "impossible" and "on my screen" is basically gone.
The reality is that "can this be real" has evolved from a simple expression of awe into a genuine survival tactic for the digital age. We aren't just looking at magic tricks anymore. We're looking at Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), sophisticated social engineering, and a media landscape that prioritizes "the share" over "the truth." It's exhausting.
The Anatomy of the Modern "Can This Be Real" Moment
Why do we fall for it? It isn't because we're gullible. It’s biology. Our brains are hardwired to trust visual data. For roughly 200,000 years, if you saw a lion, there was a lion. There was no "lion filter" or "CGI predator."
Today, that evolutionary shortcut is being hijacked. Look at the "Pope in a Balenciaga Puffer" incident. That image went viral because it played on a very specific psychological trigger: it was just plausible enough to be funny but weird enough to be shocking. It lacked the "uncanny valley" greasiness of earlier AI, which is why millions of people didn't even think to check the source. When the source is an anonymous account on Midjourney’s Discord, the answer to can this be real is almost always a resounding no, but by the time we realize that, the image has already been seen by 50 million people.
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The Physics of Viral Deception
- Emotional High-Jacking: If a piece of content makes you feel intense anger or sudden euphoria, your critical thinking drops by half.
- Context Collapse: A real video from 2014 gets reposted as "happening right now" in a different country. The footage is real. The story is fake.
- The Texture of Truth: High-resolution grain and "shaky cam" effects are now added to fake videos to make them feel like raw, unedited cell phone footage.
When Nature Asks the Question
Sometimes, the "can this be real" feeling doesn't come from a computer—it comes from the planet. Take the Macropinna microstoma, the Barreleye fish. It has a transparent head and tubular eyes that rotate inside its skull. If you saw a render of that on a tech blog, you’d call it fake. But it exists.
This creates a "Liar’s Dividend." This is a term coined by legal scholars Danielle Citron and Robert Chesney. It describes a world where, because so much is fake, people can claim that real things—like a politician’s actual hot-mic gaffe or a genuine environmental disaster—are just "AI-generated hoaxes." It’s the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for the powerful. If everything can be fake, nothing has to be true.
How to Fact-Check Reality Without Losing Your Mind
You don't need a degree in computer science to figure out if what you're seeing is legitimate. You just need to be a bit of a jerk about your information. Be skeptical. Be the person who asks for the receipt.
Check the Extremities
AI still struggles with the "boring" parts of the human body. Look at the hands. Look at the ears. Look at how glasses sit on a nose. In many AI-generated "can this be real" photos, the jewelry will melt into the skin, or the background people will have faces that look like smeared oil paintings. If the main subject is perfect but the guy in the back has three rows of teeth, you're looking at a bot's work.
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Reverse Image Search is Your Best Friend
If you’re on Chrome, right-click and "Search Image with Google." If that "mind-blowing" photo of a purple forest only appears on one weird "Inspirational Quotes" Facebook page and not on National Geographic or a reputable news site, it's fake. Real wonders usually have multiple witnesses and different camera angles.
The "Sovereign Source" Rule
Who is telling you this? If it's a "Breaking News" account with a blue checkmark but only 400 followers and a bio that links to a crypto scam, it doesn't matter how real the video looks. It’s junk. The blue checkmark doesn't mean "verified" anymore; it means "I paid eleven dollars."
The Psychological Toll of Constant Skepticism
Living in a state of "can this be real" is actually kind of depressing. It robs us of wonder. When we see something truly beautiful or a feat of incredible human athleticism, our first instinct is now to look for the wires or the digital artifacts. We’re losing the ability to be genuinely surprised because we’ve been burned too many times by "Deepfake Tom Cruise" or those "staged" rescue videos that plague YouTube.
Research from the MIT Media Lab found that false news spreads six times faster than the truth on social media. Why? Because the truth is often boring and complicated. Fakes are designed to be "sticky." They are engineered to answer the question can this be real with a "God, I hope so" or "I knew it!"
Actionable Steps to Safeguard Your Reality
Stop being a passive consumer. It's time to treat your digital diet like your physical one. You wouldn't eat a sandwich you found on the sidewalk; don't put unverified "viral" info into your brain.
- Implement a "Five-Second Rule": Before you hit share, wait five seconds. Ask: Why am I seeing this now? Who benefits from me believing this?
- Verify the Metadata: If you’re truly suspicious of a file, tools like "FotoForensics" can show you if an image has been heavily manipulated or re-saved multiple times, which is a hallmark of digital forgery.
- Follow the Experts, Not the Aggregators: Follow actual scientists, journalists, and photographers. Aggregator accounts (the ones with names like "World of History" or "Science is Amazing") are notorious for posting unsourced, edited, or flat-out fake content just to drive engagement numbers.
- Check the "Shadow Logic": In videos, look at the shadows. Do they move with the person? Is the lighting on the face consistent with the sun in the background? AI often gets the "global illumination" wrong.
The next time you see something that makes you ask can this be real, take a breath. It probably isn't. And if it is, the truth will still be there after you've spent two minutes verifying it. In a world of digital illusions, your attention is the most valuable currency you have. Don't spend it on ghosts.