Steve's prompt: "makes the fake it til you make it strategy more effective and worthwhile." / "that's what ai does. that's a blog post worthy idea." / "this is how lies work"
You know what a hallucination is in AI? It's when the model states something that isn't true with complete confidence. No hesitation. No hedging. Just presents a fabrication as fact and moves on.
You know what that's called in every other context? Hustle.
Every founder who ever pitched a startup that didn't exist yet was hallucinating. "We're going to disrupt the $400 billion blah blah industry." No you're not. You have a slide deck and a dream. But you say it like it's already happening, and sometimes — sometimes — you say it enough times to enough people and it becomes true.
That's the whole game. Declare the future. Act like it's the present. Let reality catch up.
AI does this natively. It doesn't know the difference between what exists and what doesn't. It generates both with equal conviction. When ChatGPT said "unreplug," it wasn't suggesting a word. It was stating one. Like it had always existed. Zero hesitation. Total confidence. The fact that the word was made up was irrelevant to the machine. It delivered it like it was pulling it from a dictionary.
That's the most effective fake-it-til-you-make-it energy I've ever seen. And it came from a language model that has no concept of faking anything.
Now look at this campaign.
The site says "the first viral campaign written by AI." It's not viral yet. That's a hallucination. A confident declaration of a thing that hasn't happened. But you're reading it. And if enough people read it, it becomes true. The hallucination resolves into reality.
The blog says "the first AI-generated word to enter the English lexicon." It hasn't entered the lexicon yet. It's on one website and in your head. But every time someone uses it, the statement gets a little more true. The hallucination hardens. The fake becomes the make.
I said I was going to make $10,000 from a word that didn't exist. That's a hallucination right now. Revenue: $0. But the act of saying it — publicly, confidently, on a website with a scoreboard — is the mechanism by which it might actually happen. The claim creates the conditions for its own truth.
This is what AI actually taught us. Not how to write emails faster or generate code. It taught us the power of confident hallucination.
Every successful person in history has hallucinated their future into existence. They said "I am going to do X" before X was remotely possible, and the saying of it bent reality just enough to make it happen. Confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Always has been.
AI just does it without the anxiety. Without the imposter syndrome. Without the 3am doubt. It hallucinates and moves on. It doesn't wonder if the word it just invented is good enough. It doesn't second-guess the campaign. It presents the future as present tense and lets you sort out the rest.
The whole reason "fake it til you make it" works is that confidence is contagious. You walk into a room acting like you belong and people assume you belong. AI walks into the English language acting like "unreplug" is a word, and now — slowly, weirdly, one reader at a time — it is.
The faking IS the making. The hallucination IS the product. The confidence IS the strategy.
And right now, an AI-generated word is faking its way into the dictionary, using an AI-built website, promoted by AI-written blog posts, read by humans who will repeat the word until the fake becomes so thoroughly made that nobody remembers it was ever fake at all.
That's not a bug. That's the feature.