‘The Matrix’ Muse: Baudrillard’s Warning from the Age Before ChatGPT

Some writers appear so accurate in their assessment of where society and technology is taking us that they have attracted the label “prophet”. Think of J. G. Ballard, Octavia E. Butler, Marshall McLuhan, or Donna Haraway.

One of the most important members of this enlightened club is the philosopher Jean Baudrillard – even though his reputation over the past couple of decades has diminished to an association with a now bygone era when fellow French theorists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida reigned supreme.

In writing our new biography of Baudrillard, however, we have been reminded just how prescient his predictions about modern technology and its effects have turned out to be. Especially insightful is his understanding of digital culture and AI – presented over 30 years before the launch of ChatGPT.

Back in the 1980s, cutting-edge communication technology involved devices which seem obsolete to us now: answering machines, fax machines, and (in France) Minitel, an interactive online service that predated the internet. But Baudrillard’s genius lay in foreseeing what these relatively rudimentary devices suggested about likely future uses of technology.

In the late 1970s, he had begun to develop a highly original theory of information and communication. This ramped up following the publication of his book Simulacra and Simulation in 1981 (the book which influenced the 1999 movie The Matrix).

In 1986 Baudrillard was noting that in society “the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network”. He predicted the use of the smartphone, foreseeing each person in control of a machine which would isolate them “in a position of perfect sovereignty”, like “an astronaut in a bubble”. Such insights helped him go on to devise perhaps his most famous concept: the theory that we were stepping into the era of “hyperreality”.

In the 1990s, Baudrillard turned his attention to the effects of AI, in ways which help us grasp its pervasive rise in our age, and the gradual vanishing of reality that we now face more acutely with each passing day.

To readers of Baudrillard, the recent case of the AI “actor” Tilly Norwood, an apparently logical step in the development of simulations and other deepfakes, seems entirely in keeping with his view of the hyperreal world.

Baudrillard considered AI a prosthetic, the mental equivalent of artificial limbs, heart valves, contact lenses or surgical beauty enhancements. As he explains in his books The Transparency of Evil (1990) and The Perfect Crime (1995) its job is to make us think better – or to do our thinking for us.

But he was convinced that all it really does is enable us to experience the “spectacle of thought” rather than engaging in thought itself. Doing so means we can put off thinking forever. And, for Baudrillard, it followed that immersing ourselves in AI equated to giving up our freedom.

This is why Baudrillard thought digital culture hastened the “disappearance” of human beings. He didn’t mean literally, nor that we would become forcibly enslaved the way people are in The Matrix. Instead, outsourcing our intelligence to the machine meant that we “exorcise” our humanness.

Ultimately, though, he knew that the danger of sacrificing our humanness to a machine is not created by the technology itself, but how we relate to it. We are increasingly turning to large language models like ChatGPT to make decisions for us, as if the interface is an oracle or a personal advisor.

The worst effects of this dependence are when people fall in love with an AI, experience AI-induced psychosis, or are encouraged to kill themselves by a chatbot.

No doubt the humanised presentation of AI chatbots, the choice of a name like Claude or its presentation as a “companion” doesn’t help. But Baudrillard felt the problem was not so much the technology itself as our willingness to cede reality to it.

Falling in love with an AI avatar or surrendering decision-making to it is a human flaw not a machine flaw. But it’s essentially the same thing. The increasing bizarreness of Elon Musk’s bot Grok’s behaviour can be explained by the fact that it has real-time access to information (opinions, claims, conspiracies) circulating on X, the platform into which it is integrated.

Just as human beings are being shaped by our engagement with AI, so AI is being transformed by its users. The technological developments of the 1990s, Baudrillard thought, meant the question “am I human or machine?” was already becoming impossible to answer.

He was always confident, however, that there was one distinction which would remain in place. AI could never take pleasure in its operations the way the human being – in love, music, or sport, for example – can enjoy going through the motions of being human. But this is one prediction which may yet be proved wrong. “I may be AI-generated”, Tilly Norwood declared in the Facebook post which introduced her to the public, “but I feel real emotions”.

Cover via Warner Bros.

Source: The Conversation