AI Generated Content, the rise of Pseudo Reality and Authoritarianism

The University of London made a wonderful video on how AI Generated Content played its part in inciting the Southport riots. I am not going to reiterate the points that they made. I am more interested in how the right crafts its reality using AI Generated Content.

The Southport riots were incited in part through the illusion of invasion of Islam into Britain, that children are under immediate threat by Muslims and the only way this so-called invasion is through the violent expulsion of all Muslims from Britain. AI Generated Content helped prop up the pseudo reality that the far-right live in. It also enforces the pseudo reality that far right people live.

Through the creation of AI generated content, rhetoric becomes a bit more solid, suddenly you have a tangible sense of proof that your ideas are valid. Which allows the creation and reinforcement of the hallucination.

Because it creates the image of reality. Bias sets in and the dogma isn’t questioned; it cannot be questioned.

This method of creating the pseudo reality is nothing new, it is a staple of authoritarian, nay majority propaganda. I shall talk about propaganda in a broad sense, but in the past most propaganda, the enforcement of pseudo reality, is using documentaries and historical dramas.

Nazi cinema for instance used documentaries to illustrate the power of the Nazi party, crafting the image that the party is all encompassing, great and terrible. Triumph of the Will is the best example of this, using the language of documentary to create the pseudo reality that they weren’t at threat of civil war between the Nazi supporters and Wehrmacht. The Eternal Jew does a similar thing, using documentary filmmaking to craft the reality that Jews are weak, evil people who deserve to be rejected, that they are threatening to the German people and the blood of the nation. Through The Eternal Jew, the Nazis demonize the Jews into rats, into pests deserving of their eventual extermination.[1]

Jud Süß [2]uses historical drama to craft the reality that Jews cannot be trusted, using the fact that a court Jew did exist for the Duke of Württemberg. But this is the only fact that the movie employs, the rest is fiction.

Reality is often mundane, often unremarkable. The authoritarian, ever the dramatic, needs to distort history and make whole new facts to fit the reality they want to impose.

I have been interested in North Korean cinema for a long time, and the same fixation on the historical, like The Flower Girl[3], persists. These films are often set during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War with America, both defining moments in North Korean culture[4]. These movies, while based on historical reality, exist to justify the current government’s existence. The world is out to get you, the world will destroy us, thus we must have a strong military culture.

 Authoritarians use art to make the reality they want and then impose it upon the populace. And through this pseudo reality comes the power of which the authoritarians use to maintain power.

We are watching the attempted grabbing of power. Due to the lack of artists willing to provide content towards the ascension of authoritarianism, AI Generated Content cuts out the middleman. No risk of being rejected from the art world, and if you can’t force people to make art for you, you turn to the machine. You craft your own reality from the ground up, to create snapshots of what is deemed to be happening now.

Bibliography

Jud Süß,  Harlan Veit, (Reich Propaganda Directorate 1940)

The Eternal Jew,  Hippler Fritz, (Reich Propaganda Directorate 1940)

The Flower Girl,  Kim Il Sung (The Korean Art Film Studio 1930)

James Bell , 'In a Lonely Place: North Korea’s Pyongyang International Film Festival', BFI, 12 June2015,<https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/lonely-place-north-koreas-pyongyang-international-film-festival> [accessed 27/09/2026],

[1] Hippler Fritz, The Eternal Jew  1940

[2] Harlan Veit, Jud Süß 1940

[3] Kim Il Sung, The Flower Girl 1930

[4] James Bell , 'In a Lonely Place: North Korea’s Pyongyang International Film Festival', BFI, 12 June2015,<https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/lonely-place-north-koreas-pyongyang-international-film-festival> [accessed 27/09/2026], para 13 of 23.