Welcome to the shocking revelation of the century: advertisements on the internet might not be entirely truthful. I know, take a moment to clutch your pearls and fan yourself. A recent piece over at The Verge expresses deep, soul-shattering “irk” over the fact that Samsung and other tech giants are using generative AI in their TikTok ads without slapping a big, friendly “This is a Robot Lie” sticker on them. Because, as we all know, before AI came along, every single commercial was a documentary-style capture of objective reality.

Let’s talk about this obsession with AI labeling. The author is deeply troubled that TikTok’s enforcement of its own AI policy is about as sturdy as a wet paper towel. They claim to spend “a great deal of time scrutinizing images” for the “tells” of synthetic media—six fingers, melting ears, the usual eldritch horrors—yet they are still demanding a label. If you can already tell it’s AI, why do you need the app to hold your hand and confirm it? It’s like watching a magician clearly drop a coin into his lap and then getting angry that he didn’t provide a written affidavit explaining the physics of the disappearance. If you’re such a master of “scrutinizing,” consider this your graduation into the real world: advertising is, by definition, a curated hallucination.

The argument hinges on the idea that “someone knows for sure” if the content is AI-generated and they are maliciously withholding that information. Oh, the humanity! Imagine a world where a multi-billion-dollar corporation like Samsung doesn’t prioritize your personal need for digital transparency over their desire to sell you a Galaxy S24. Samsung has been caught “enhancing” photos of the moon with textures that didn’t exist in the original sensor data—a fact well-documented by tech sleuths—yet we’re acting surprised that they aren’t being forthcoming about using AI to make a TikTok ad look slightly more vibrant? It’s cute that we still expect honesty from the people who invented “Beauty Mode” filters that reconstruct your entire face in real-time.

TikTok’s advertising policies technically require disclosure for synthetic media, but expecting a platform built on the foundation of filters, deep-fake-adjacent face swaps, and highly processed “aesthetic” lifestyles to be the moral arbiter of truth is peak internet delusion. TikTok’s algorithm cares about your retention span, not your cognitive grip on what is “real.” If the AI-generated ad keeps you watching for 15 seconds, the algorithm has won. The policy exists to appease regulators, not to act as a digital forensics lab for the disgruntled.

The assumption here is that an “AI-generated” label would somehow protect the consumer. Protect them from what? Buying a phone that makes them look better than they do in real life? Newsflash: professional lighting, $50,000 RED cameras, and six weeks of post-production in Adobe Premiere have been creating “fake” imagery for decades. If we start labeling everything that isn’t raw, unedited footage shot on a 2005 camcorder, the entire internet would be one giant warning sign.

So, while we wait for TikTok to magically fix its enforcement and for Samsung to suddenly develop a conscience regarding metadata transparency, maybe we can stop “scrutinizing” pixels and just accept the obvious: if you’re looking at an ad, you’re being lied to. Whether that lie was told by a human with a paintbrush or a GPU in a server farm is irrelevant. The “irk” isn’t that the ads are AI; the irk is that you’re still expecting the internet to be your friend. Stay cynical, friends. It’s the only “tell” that still works.