There is a delicious, if somewhat predictable, irony in watching Paris Hilton—a woman who spent the better part of the turn of the millennium convincing the world that a curated void could be a career—now trembling at the prospect of that void being automated. The pioneer of the ‘famous for being famous’ business model has arrived on the steps of the American legislative temple to warn us that artificial intelligence is coming for our faces. It is a moment of such exquisite absurdity that even Beckett might have found it a bit too on-the-nose: the woman who effectively invented the human deepfake is now terrified of the algorithmic one.

For those of us who have spent decades watching the slow-motion collapse of Western intellectual rigor, Hilton’s emergence as a champion of digital consent is the ultimate punchline. She is, in many ways, the patron saint of the artificial. Long before the first generative adversarial network was a glimmer in a Silicon Valley developer’s eye, Hilton was already practicing a form of human post-production. She crafted a persona so distinct, so flattened, and so relentlessly branded that she became a logo with a heartbeat. Now, the logo is upset that other people are using the stationery without paying the licensing fee.

Her recent public declarations against the proliferation of AI-generated deepfakes—specifically those of a non-consensual or pornographic nature—are, on their surface, entirely reasonable. Even a stopped clock in a Swarovski-encrusted casing is right twice a day. The violation of bodily autonomy through digital synthesis is a genuine horror, a technological evolution of the same predatory impulses that have always haunted the fringes of our ‘civilized’ society. Yet, when the warning comes from Hilton, it carries the weight of a tobacco executive complaining about the smell of smoke. She spent twenty years teaching the masses that the image is more important than the person, and now she is shocked—shocked!—that the image has finally decided to divorce the person and strike out on its own.

Watching our political class interact with this celebrity-led advocacy is like watching a troupe of aging monkeys trying to understand a monolith. Senators and representatives, most of whom likely require a team of interns to successfully navigate a television remote, nod with practiced solemnity as Hilton explains the nuances of digital mimicry. It is a tragicomic theater of the absurd. The bureaucrats see a glamorous ally who can garner headlines; Hilton sees a chance to pivot from reality-star-survivor to digital-rights-activist; and the public sees a shiny distraction from the fact that our legislative bodies move with the speed of continental drift while the technology they seek to regulate is moving at the speed of light.

Let us be honest: we are already living in a deepfake reality. We have been for some time. Our political discourse is a synthesized collection of talking points generated by consultants to mimic human emotion; our economy is a series of speculative bubbles supported by imaginary assets; and our culture is a feedback loop of nostalgia and vapidity. Hilton isn't just a victim of this new technology; she is its biological predecessor. She is the ‘Original Copy,’ and her fear is the very human fear of obsolescence. If a machine can produce a ‘That’s Hot’ with more conviction and less overhead than the woman who trademarked the phrase, what is left for the heiress to do?

This is the ‘I told you so’ moment for those of us who viewed the rise of influencer culture with the same enthusiasm one might reserve for a localized outbreak of the plague. We traded substance for spectacle, and now the spectacle has become self-sustaining. The deepfake is the logical conclusion of a world that prioritizes the ‘look’ of a thing over the ‘truth’ of a thing. We are now entering an era where reality is a boutique product, and authenticity is just another filter one can apply in post-production. Hilton’s crusade is less a defense of human rights and more a desperate attempt to maintain the monopoly on her own artifice.

In the end, we are left with a landscape where the only thing more artificial than the AI deepfakes is the indignation of the people who paved the way for them. The theater is collapsing, the actors are shouting at the scenery, and the audience is too busy recording the disaster on their phones to notice they are the ones trapped inside. It is classic, it is cynical, and in a world where Paris Hilton is the voice of reason on technological ethics, it is perfectly, miserably expected.