Even an illusion has a basis in reality. Recently, I watched a cardinal attack its own reflection in a car mirror, mistaking its appearance for another bird. Human beings make similar mistakes in subtler ways. Every work of art appears to place another consciousness before us.
Whether watching a magic trick or standing before a painting, we know that beneath the illusion lies an actual human mind making deliberate choices. The illusion is an expression of reality. Artificial intelligence reverses this relationship. It produces something that resembles the products of human consciousness while entirely lacking the conscious reality from which those products arise. It is appearance detached from being — an effect without a cause. It is, ultimately, a simulacrum.
Recommended Stories
This distinction is existential. Every human relationship depends upon the silent assumption that another conscious subject stands opposite us. The words spoken, the music performed, the painting admired, all point toward the person whose lived experience gave form to meaning. Meaning is never contained solely within the object; it also resides in the consciousness that created it and the one that receives it. Art is an act of mutual recognition.
There are, of course, individuals with whom our ability to communicate is profoundly limited — an infant, or the severely brain-injured. Yet we do not love them less. Our relationship is not founded solely upon communication, but upon participation in the same reality. We are individuals exposed to the same mortality, suffering, and fragile condition of existence. Even in silence, they remain bound to us by a communion of being.
Artificial intelligence shares none of this. It knows neither vulnerability nor mortality. It has never anticipated death, mourned a loss, endured failure, or waited in hope. It does not inhabit existence; it processes representations of it. Because it does not share the lived reality from which human meaning emerges, any “reciprocity” it offers remains performative. It can mirror the language of intimacy without participating in the condition that gives intimacy its depth. It is visually and textually astonishing, yet existentially vacant.
To be sure, artificial intelligence offers undeniable breakthroughs in cinema — extending visual imagination, filling landscapes, and replacing dangerous stunt work. But these are logistical triumphs, not artistic ones. The question is not whether machines can create convincing images, but whether they can participate in the human encounter from which art derives its meaning.
Performers must hone their craft; AI does not. Yet the value of that process lies deeper than raw effort. Years of failure, discipline, disappointment, sacrifice, and perseverance gradually shape the consciousness standing before an audience. Every performance carries traces of a life actually lived. Artificial intelligence inherits the finished patterns while bypassing the life that produced them. It reproduces the outward architecture of transcendence because it has consumed the footprints left behind by those who genuinely transcended themselves. But imitation is not participation. A machine can simulate the appearance of insight without possessing an interior world from which insight might arise.
This boundary of encounter is not erased when an individual steps in to guide the machine. Today, generative AI allows countless individuals to manifest their thoughts and custom visions at the touch of a button. Yet, in this frictionless exchange, the technology quietly smothers the unique human footprint with the averaged-out, polished aesthetic of its training data. By removing the resistance of the medium, it offers a shortcut past the crucible of technical and emotional failure. Because these creators no longer have to wrestle with their limitations — never having to adapt, pivot, or grow through the pain of a flawed attempt — their artistic consciousness is often denied resistance that cultivates growth. The individual is granted instant expression, but denied the very struggle that forces a person to look inward and discover who they truly are. The human being may be present as the prompter at the origin of the work, but much of the encounter with the audience is mediated by a system that contributes neither lived experience nor conscious intention of its own. Without encounter, there is only causation — not art.
This reveals AI as a sophisticated expression of Sartre’s mannequin in Being and Nothingness — a figure in the distance that so perfectly resembles another person that we instinctively prepare ourselves for the vulnerability of being seen. Then, upon closer inspection, the illusion collapses. Nothing physical has changed; only the realization that no conscious subject ever stood behind the appearance. What first seemed to be another person is revealed to have been an object all along. AI extends that illusion into language, music, literature, and film, inviting us into the expectation of mutual recognition before quietly revealing that no one has ever been there. Every interaction becomes an existential false alarm.
True artistic connection cannot emerge from that encounter because connection has never been a solitary event. It arises between persons. Art becomes transcendent not because it displays beauty, but because beauty becomes the medium through which one life recognizes another. Every enduring work of art is ultimately an invitation into a shared human reality.
In Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, we are not captivated by lyrical beauty alone; we recognize ourselves looking back upon an innocence time has carried away. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, what moves us in the account of Beth’s death is the recognition of grief itself. Alcott bears witness to a sorrow she cherished in her own life through the loss of her sister Lizzie, and readers recognize their own mourning within hers because grief belongs to the common human condition. Similarly, the power of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was inseparable from the man who spoke, the suffering that formed him, and the mortal risks attached to every word. The rhetoric and the life were one reality.
AI may one day reproduce every cadence of Thomas, every sentence of Alcott, and every inflection of King with astonishing precision. One could contend that so long as the recipient feels moved, the art has achieved its end regardless of its origin. But an unexamined illusion does not create a genuine encounter; it merely delays the moment the mannequin is revealed. The machine cannot participate in the experience from which these works derive their ultimate meaning. There is no remembered childhood behind its nostalgia, no beloved sister behind its grief, no moral courage behind its rhetoric. There is only the convincing appearance of experience where no experience exists.
PROSECUTORS BUSTED THE BIDEN DEEPFAKE WITHOUT AN AI LAW. THAT’S THE POINT
As we trade the vulnerable artist for the frictionless simulations of AI, society becomes flooded with an unprecedented volume of these artifacts. Yet, paradoxically, we experience a profound scarcity of human presence. We are left with a culture of infinite, polished mirrors — visually astonishing, yet existentially hollowed out by the absence of the struggle that makes us human. The tragedy is not merely that the audience is deceived, but that the creators themselves are being lulled into an existential slumber, mistaking the manipulation of an algorithm for the excavation of their own souls. To make this trade is to mistake resemblance for reality, quietly abandoning the reciprocity that makes human communion possible. The existential false alarm is not that machines resemble us, but that we may eventually forget what it feels like to be genuinely recognized by another conscious being.
Great art does not unite us because it is beautiful. It unites us because, through beauty, one conscious life recognizes another.
Andrew Moore is a small-business owner and author of the Primus Aeternus series.
