You’re not plagiarising, you’re optimising your time—copy-pasting with intentional, quiet
confidence. And honestly? That’s iconic. ✨.
As a philosophy student, a lot of my work concerns questioning what is real. Could we be living in a simulation? Could the people around us be empty, unconscious bodies, programmed to display human behaviours (or what philosopher David Chalmers calls “Philosophical Zombies”)? I have spent months on these questions.
But honestly, the more I search for signs I’m in the Matrix—or wait for my housemates to
magically switch off when I’m not in the room—the more I realise that fake people and worlds aren’t the threat to our reality we think they are.
As we use AI to generate paintings, stories, and essays, it seems absurd to concentrate our
obsession with authenticity on sci-fi tropes or 17th century thought experiments (Descartes, I’m looking at you). The truth is that the line between what’s real and what isn’t is being blurred, not by soulless people, but by soulless, author-less creations: AI generated media.
A distinction I made recently (in an essay about whether we’re living in a simulation) is between what’s real and what’s realistic. A simulated reality, no matter how much it resembles our world, can only ever be realistic—a realistic reconstruction of our daily experiences. Reality— unaccommodating, unmodifiable—is a quality that can’t be replicated because it transcends physical appearances. There is a deep, underlying substance to it, that can’t be replicated with bits and bytes on a computer.
But the relevance of my newly-coined philosophical terms didn’t occur to me until I discovered that a large portion of students taking that module had used AI to generate the coursework. They submitted outwardly impressive essays, with clear prose and coherent structures, that were devoid of research, time, and effort. They had successfully submitted a realistic essay—sensorially indistinguishable from the real thing, but lacking in the underlying substance that makes that thing what it is: a thought process, the conversion of ideas into sentences, a conscious experience. My course-mates had produced their very own philosophical zombies, scrutinising the possibility of a reality that we are already living in. A reality where we fail to distinguish what appears to be real from what is, where the the authenticity of something is defined by how it appears to others, or how it performs, as opposed to what it actually is.
We see this in other facets of society. In fact, we’re consumed by appearances. With looking happy as opposed to being happy; looking successful as opposed to working hard; or simply pretending to be someone we’re not to maintain the illusion that we’re well adjusted, desirable people.
The effort that we put into performing these things gets confused with being them. It’s no
wonder no one bats an eye when someone presents a series of zeroes and ones as their analysis of Nietzsche. If it looks like the real thing, then it must be the real thing—right?
So no, I don’t think I’m living in the Matrix. I don’t think I’m surrounded by bodies feigning
consciousness. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not surrounded by falsity, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I’m not disturbed by it. This isn’t to say that we should abandon technology and live like hermits, rewriting manuscripts until our hands bleed. This is to say that if the quality of realness is intrinsic to us, pretence is theft.
Just think, create, and be. When you boil it down, that’s all we are.
Image credits – Matheus Bertelli (Pexels)
