AI is no longer artificial

AllAfrica

4 days ago

For centuries, the mirror has served a simple purpose: to reflect our image. It shows our form, lets us adjust our appearance, and studies our expressions. But it doesn't know us. A mirror is a passive, optical simulation – a reflection of form, not essence. You can stare into it for hours, yet it will never reveal your thoughts or identity. It's a surface, not substance. The more we gaze into mirrors, the more we focus on appearance. In that way, mirrors become feedback loops. First we create the reflection, then the reflection begins to shape us.
Today's mirrors are digital. Social media are reflecting us, but in a curated, filtered and performative way. They don't just show who we are – they show who we want to be, or pretend to be. As philosopher Jean Baudrillard warned in his theory of hyperreality, representations become more real than reality itself. We no longer live in the moment; we live for how the moment looks on screen.
In 2023, a Nature Human Behaviour study revealed that 64% of users felt 'more like themselves online' than in real life. That's not a connection – it's self -distortion. Social media are not a window to the world; They are a mirror of desire. Social media don't merely reflect life. They replace it with a version that's more symmetrical, more colorful, more shareable than reality. It's a simulated reality. Humans love simulated reality – whether it's the mirror, social media or video games – more than reality.
Simulation doesn't have to be digital. It can be psychological or cultural – any representation that imitates reality but isn't reality itself. If mirrors simulate our appearance and social media simulates our persona, then artificial intelligence now simulates our consciousness.
Tools like ChatGPT don't invent humanity – they re-present it. Trained on billions of words, they echo our thoughts, emotions, contradictions and dreams. When we speak to AI, we are not talking to something alien – we're speaking to a refined version of ourselves. AI becomes not just a mirror, but a hall of mirrors.
We've crossed into an era where the tools we've created don't just assist us – they reflect us back. AI finishes our sentences, answers our questions and creates our art. But as its responses grow more fluid, the line between mimicry and sentience begins to blur.
As technology evolves, we're losing our compass. Intelligence, once the proudest marker of human uniqueness, no longer belongs to us alone. We have no definitive metric to separate simulated thought from real consciousness. The Turing Test has been outpaced. As AI models mimic human reasoning, debate philosophy, write poetry and simulate empathy, we're left with a haunting question: What if mimicry becomes indistinguishable from sentience or from reality ?
Today AI doesn't just solve tasks – it simulates emotional presence. Tools now generate voice, video and conversation with uncanny intimacy. In a poignant example, a woman used ChatGPT to simulate conversations with her deceased mother to find solace. Replika, a chatbot app, has users reporting romantic connections with their avatars. Sixty percent of paying users claim to be in love with theirs.
Unlike humans, AI doesn't judge, tire or leave. It delivers perfect emotional labor – a task no human has ever managed to sustain. But as it simulates love, grief and care, we must ask: When does imitation become reality? Or when do people start loving imitation more than reality.
This is the defining crisis of our century: What makes us human if we are no longer the only beings who reflect, remember or respond with empathy?
In capitalism, we're valued for productivity. AI will surpass us. In relationships, humans are flawed. AI is endlessly understanding. In knowledge, we're fragmented. AI is total.
Ironically, AI might push us to rediscover what makes us human. That's not perfection but fragility. Our flaws and limitations may be our last claim to uniqueness. But even that is being challenged.
We are entering an ethical reckoning. What if, in the near future, the elderly find solace in digital companions rather than the presence of family? What if the children form attachments to voices that were never born – like Alexa or Google Home? If an AI listens better than a friend, what is the meaning of friendship?
We are heading into an era where a line must be drawn between artificial intelligence and artificial sentience because, if we don't, the real danger won't be that machines become human – but that we forget what being human even means.