The young woman in the stands simply sighed, turned her head and sat there, looking impossibly composed, while 15 million strangers fell briefly in love with someone who had never existed.
She was, according to the caption accompanying one of many posts, “the average Korean woman”. Her admirers quickly crowned her a “baseball goddess”, analysing her every feature with the forensic enthusiasm reserved for internet obsessions, as the five-second clip went viral across South Korea’s online communities.
Then someone noticed the scoreboard.
The broadcast graphic in the top left of the picture showed a current Hanwha Eagles pitcher facing a retired Doosan Bears batter in a match-up that could not have occurred.
The goddess was a fiction – assembled by an algorithm and indistinguishable, to millions of viewers, from the real thing.
Within days, copycat clips had started flooding social feeds. Users inserted themselves beside BTS star Jungkook in stadium seats and transplanted invented spectators into Formula One paddocks and NBA arenas, manufacturing presence where there had been none before.
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