Who Is Even Real Anymore?

I need to tell you about something that’s been messing with my head.

I was scrolling through Instagram a few days ago, just normal scrolling, not looking for anything and I stopped on this creator’s reel. Perfect lighting. Smooth skin. Some motivational caption about morning routines. I watched it, almost double-tapped, and then something felt off. I went to their profile. Every photo looked the same. Same angle, same glow, same vaguely inspirational energy. No messy stories. No bad takes. No personality. Just... content.

I’m pretty sure she wasn’t real. Like, AI-generated. Entirely.

And the scary part? I almost couldn’t tell. I had to sit there and zoom in and look for weird fingers and think about it for a full minute before I decided something was off. A year ago that would’ve taken me two seconds.

Then I noticed two more that same week. Different accounts, same energy. Flawless. Polished. Zero opinions about anything. Just vibes and product placements.

Here’s what bothers me about this, and it’s not the AI part.

It’s that I genuinely asked myself that why do I even follow people online anymore? What am I getting from this? Because if I can’t tell the difference between a real person and a generated one, then what exactly is the relationship I have with the “creators” on my feed?

It used to be that you followed someone because you trusted their taste. They recommended a restaurant, you went. They wore something, you bought it. The whole influencer economy was built on trust like real person, real opinion, real experience.

But when half the feed might be AI, that trust just... evaporates. You don’t know who’s real, who’s generated, and who’s a real person using so many filters and scripts that they might as well be AI. The line is gone.

And I think people can feel it even if they can’t name it. There’s this low-grade suspicion now when you watch a recommendation. A review. A “day in my life.” Is this real? Does this person actually exist? Did they actually go to that restaurant or did a brand just give them a script?

I’ve been thinking about what the antidote to this is. And I don’t think it’s better content. I don’t think it’s “more authentic” reels or longer captions or going camera-off. The content game is cooked. AI will always out-produce, out-polish, and out-optimise real people. That war is already lost.

The antidote is rooms.

Real rooms. With real faces. Where you can look someone in the eye and know they’re a person with bad days and weird opinions and food stuck in their teeth. Where a recommendation means something because the person saying it is standing right in front of you.

The creators who are building the most genuine communities right now aren’t the ones with the best content. They’re the ones hosting things. Running a pottery night. Organising a supper club. Showing up at a run club every Saturday morning. You can’t fake that. You can’t AI-generate a room full of people who came because they trust the host.

I keep noticing this shift. The creators I actually trust now at least the ones whose opinions I’d act on are almost never the ones with the most polished feeds. They’re the ones I’ve met. Or the ones who host things where I can see who shows up. Or the ones whose communities exist offline, not just in a comments section.

There’s something about being in a room with someone that no amount of content can replicate. You can feel whether someone’s real. You can feel whether they care. You can’t fake energy in a room the way you can fake it in a reel.

This is part of why we built Offlyn the way we did.

We kept seeing creators and hosts who had ideas, had audiences, had taste — but didn’t have the infrastructure to actually bring people together offline. Finding venues is a nightmare. Managing bookings is scattered across five apps. Getting brand support is impossible if you’re not already big.

So we’re building the thing that makes it actually doable. The venue. The ticketing. The brand connections. The whole stack. Because the future of trust isn’t content. It’s rooms. And the people building those rooms shouldn’t have to figure out the infrastructure alone.

If your feed is starting to feel like a hall of mirrors, maybe it’s time to walk into an actual room instead.

The people there are real. I promise.

If you’re a creator thinking about hosting your first IRL event or if you’ve been feeling what I just described then reply to this email. We want to hear from you.

find us here

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