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We are entering a post-truth visual culture where images no longer document reality—they manufacture it. This thesis, AI-Real Enough, investigates how the mass production of emotionally persuasive digital selves reshapes identity, authenticity, and trust. In an era where AI can generate endless variations of a single person, each believable, emotional, and manipulable authenticity becomes unstable, and identity shifts from something singular to something distributed. Drawing from visual culture, neuroscience, and media theory, this research argues that emotional resonance has overtaken factual accuracy as the primary mechanism of belief. Studies show that novelty, humor, and surprise activate dopamine-driven reward systems in the brain, reinforcing attention and making emotionally engaging content more persuasive and memorable . Within digital platforms optimized for virality, repetition and circulation further transform simulation into perceived truth. Through the production of hundreds of AI-generated versions of the self, this project examines how identity dissolves under infinite reproduction. When images can say anything and appear everywhere, truth is no longer something we verify. It is something we feel.

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