Hyperreality is here! AI generated music, AI porn, the Body without Organs and schizophrenic capitalism

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. (...) It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.¹

-Jean Baudrillard

 

            Hyperreality is the term Baudrillard used to describe a simulation of a reality with no origin, a fiction with no pre-existing reality. In the hyperreality, the boundaries that separate true from false, appearance from essence or reality from fiction get blurred. It is no longer a question of finding the content behind the form, the truth behind the illusion or the “true self” hiding underneath the mask – in hyperreality, there is nothing behind the mask, the fiction becomes “more real than reality itself” such as it substitutes it. The Borges fable in which the map of the empire becomes as big and detailed as the empire itself, that you might as well live in the map itself, has come full circle: to live in hyperreality means to live in such a big and detailed map with no original referent.

            We're going to see a huge shift in technology that will force us to rethink everything we know our identity, sense of self and the boundaries separating "self" from "other", "mine" from "ours" and reality from fantasy.

Deep fakes are getting more and more realistic², sometimes being indistinguishable from a real recording of the person. The one we should be paying extra focus is deep fake porn. AI-generated porn is already often indistinguishable from reality^{3, 4, 5}. You can ban deep fake porn, but it's very hard to regulate and actually put into practice. Extremely soon enough everyone will have in their cheap computers a tool that can create hyper-realistic AI porn of anyone they know.

Soon enough, because the technology is already there, as can be seen in links (3), (4) and (5). Of course, those are not copies of real people, but are AI generated images that are close to indistinguishable from reality. We have already reached a point where we have the technology where you can have a picture of yourself clothed, a real picture of yourself naked and an AI-generated picture of yourself naked such that a person who has not seen you naked cannot tell the difference between the real nude and the “deep fake” nude. The only thing left to advance in technology is the ease as how to produce such images (at the moment it’s not as simple as simply pushing a button – you need to train the AI with specific prompts, do some human adjustment until you get it right…) as well as the accessibility of the technology to your everyday person. From there, it will be impossible to regulate by law – I give it a year, at most two.

This raises questions about the status of revenge porn - right now it's illegal in most countries (as it should be), but in the moment where anyone will have seen everyone naked through AI, the "real" nude picture would become "undervalued". This could be thought of as a positive thing, albeit in a twisted way, that your "real" nude picture that has been leaked will be lost in 50 other AI-generated deep fakes of you that look just like the real you anyway. In a similar way to how now, misinformation is done not through censorship of correct information but through hyper-communication of false news, such that the real news get drowned out in all the "noise". If everyone will be able to generate deep fake porn of yourself, someone “leaking” a real nude picture of yourself will be unvaluable since it will be indistinguishable from the fakes.

And what about pedophilia, the most taboo/touchy subject out of all taboo subjects? How will society react when hyper-realistic AI-generated child porn will become extremely easy to create by your average person in a few years? At the moment, “child hentai” (drawing pictures of fictional underage characters) is legal in a lot of countries, and this makes sense as the drawing of a fictional character that is underage does not exploit any real children. But what about child “hentai” that is so realistic that it will be indistinguishable from “real child porn”? Will this have a positive or a negative effect upon the impact of child trafficking, or human trafficking at large?

The effect is two-fold. On one hand, real child porn, snuff, torture videos and other forms of illegal content will be drowned out in all the “noise” from the AI-generated images and videos⁶, thus “lowering” their market-value, so to speak. This could be seen as a positive thing – if the people who consume such content and incentivize the human trafficking industry to produce it now have AI at their disposal, there will be less aggregate demand for real exploitative porn and thus, less human trafficking and abuse.

But on the other hand, just as fiction can pass as reality, so can reality pass as fiction. If we legalize the production and distribution of hyperreal AI-generated torture films, snuff movies and child porn – how will we able to tell when someone owns real child porn? A person caught with the real version can just claim that it’s AI-generated, and under that new legal system we shall be forced to render him innocent until proven guilty.

So, it’s a choice, a sacrifice: you make the fiction legal and it ”undervalues” the real bad stuff, but then you can’t find out the real bad stuff. Or you criminalize it all, at which point, even fiction is banned – so there will be a higher demand for the “real” ones. And if you criminalize it all, you have to deal with how to implement it into practice considering the accessibility of such software in the future.

This two-fold attitude between simulation and reality can be seen in the recently-released AI-generated music video by Romanian rapper Argatu’⁷ – in that video, it is impossible to distinguish between which videos were AI generated and which videos were an actual recording with a filter on top. Romanian traditions are already so surreal that you could just put a filter on top of a real recording on them and convince everyone that it’s AI.

So, we see both: AI passes as reality, reality passes as AI.

The audio is advancing just as much as the video, however. Here is a video of not Kanye West singing not a Kanye West song⁸. Voice changers have advanced enough such that anyone can record their own voice and make it sound almost identical to the voice of many celebrities.

And it has been done extremely recently, a day or two ago, a person wrote a rap song in which they made their voice sound like Drake and The Weeknd, respectively⁹. I’ve listened to the song and it is very good for an AI, but one must point here that the song (“Heart On My Sleeve”) was not completely generated by AI. The lyrics, the instrumental, the voice, the mixing and the mastering were all done by a real person, the only thing that AI did was use a voice changer to make the (anonymous) singer’s voice sound identical to Drake’s and The Weeknd’s, respectively. AI voice changers can “pass” as real singers, and of course that anonymous ghost producer tried to imitate the flow and style of Drake – so we already reached a point in which everyone can write a song of their own and claim that it was a real artist who wrote it. By listening to the song, it is very hard to realize that it is not the “real” Drake or The Weeknd who are singing, since it sounds just like them.

UMC immediately jumped and tried to remove the song from all platforms and copyright it. This is of course the biggest gesture of meta-irony: wasn’t Drake one of the rappers most accused of copying flows and having ghostwriters? The post-post-modern gesture here would be if Drake and The Weeknd did a real cover of the AI-generated song of themselves…

But the gesture itself of the UMC is ridiculous: the song was produced and written by another person; the only thing they did was change their voice to sound like Drake. Impersonation should probably be illegal, at least if it’s for the purposes of defamation, but if I am transparent about the fact that I used a voice changer, what is the problem? Should one have copyright over one’s own voice? If yes, what if two people have a very similar real-life voice already?

We live in hyperreality - the boundaries between true and false will disintegrate and we will live in the matrix. There will only be the third pill - the purple pill, that will allow you to stay in the simulation while knowing that it's just a simulation. There is no blue pill or red pill.

But so will your sense of self disintegrate. We will have to rethink the entire way we distinguish our individuality from others. Now, our own voices and our own images of our naked bodies are not “private” anymore. Will “impersonation” really be more of a problem in 50 years when we will no longer have a sense of self as we currently know it?

Not only can we now experience parts of others as “ourselves” (introjection/internalization) but we can also now experience parts of ourselves as “other” (projection/externalization -> leading to depersonalization/derealization). When the AI-generated Drake song was released this week, Drake for the first time got to hear how it feels for a new Drake song to drop unexpectedly. How long until we see people modifying their voice to sound like dead artists? How many months until we see a Tupac x Biggie collab, or an Eminem featuring Machine Gun Kelly?

What about the hyper-realistic TikTok filter (released about two months ago) that can make your face more physically attractive without someone being able to realize that it’s a filter¹⁰? It does not take much to transpose this technology into a pair of “smart glasses” that one can wear and change the way other people look, as well as how oneself sees themselves in the mirror. What will happen in a few years when I will put the glasses on and be able to see myself in the mirror as a woman in a way that is indistinguishable from how I would look if I were actually born as one and I would not wear the glasses? All of those people arguing about “long-term” studies on transgender people are wasting their time, there is no longer such a thing as a long-term study on issues of identity and body image – this includes eating disorders as well. To make a “long-term”, let’s say, 15-year study on anorexia would be the dumbest thing, it’s common sense that anorexia is affected by social media. Well, in 15 years, social media changes so much that the conditions of the end of the study no longer reflect the beginning of the study. The only studies on identity we can do now are short-term. If I will put the glasses on and see myself fatter or thinner, how will that change anorexia and bulimia? Same for sexual orientation – if I put the glasses on and I am able to modify how others look, including whether they pass as male or female, how will that change it? Will we find out that, like Freud said, each of us has a bisexual predisposition? Will rates of gender dysphoria rise or fall down?

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari viewed reality in terms of organisms or “machines” – set of wholes with interdependent parts that function to “code” and “decode” flows of information that pass through them. For Guattari, desire is a positive force that happens at the break of these flows:

 

A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures). These breaks should in no way be considered as a separation from reality; rather, they operate along lines that vary according to whatever aspect of them we are considering. Every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual material flow (hyle) that it cuts into. It functions like a ham-slicing machine, removing portions* from the associative flow: the anus and the flow of shit it cuts off, for instance; the mouth that cuts off not only the flow of milk but also the flow of air and sound; the penis that interrupts not only the flow of urine but also the flow of sperm. Each associative flow must be seen as an ideal thing, an endless flux, flowing from something not unlike the immense thigh of a pig.¹¹

           

            When such a machine of interdependent parts has each of its constituent parts removed from it, all is left is a body without organs (“BwO”). A body full of organs is also a machine, since each of its parts are connected together, working in tandem to process flows of food, blood, oxygen… The BwO is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The BwO is the body that has the capacity to settle on a range of different functions and forms in potential, without yet taking on any one function or form in actuality/practice - as such, it can be thought of as an egg: “We treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata”¹².

            Transhumanism is here to stay¹³, hyperreality is turning humans into a BwO. We are no longer a set of fixed interdependent parts (“organs”, both in the literal and metaphorical sense) – these parts can be removed, modified and replaced with more ease and accessibility than ever before, both in reality and in the reality of fiction (the internet, social media, etc.). What remains of our identities after the removal of all our parts? If we accept that we are a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, all that remains of us is being a body without organs, not a being but a becoming, the pure will that turns the potential of what we can become into what we can be at any certain moment. Like an egg.

            We may need to rethink ontology as well in order to adapt to this high-speed, changing reality too. For Gilles Deleuze, a chair is not something that simply “is” but an event that “constantly happens” in reality again and again, and what we tend to call “objects” are simply events that constantly happen again and again, with minimal differences between repetitions (like rendering in video games). The body without organs is both a noun and a verb in this sense – your sense of self here is transposed from being to becoming: and the human takes an every-changing fluid identity.

            Deleuze and Guattari believe that capitalism has a schizophrenic structure, and that the more it progresses, the more we are becoming more schizophrenic “as a whole”, in society. At an individual level, all of us can be “sane” but this doesn’t matter if as a group we act as if we are insane. One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is hallucinations, of both visual and auditory form: this implies the incapacity to distinguish fiction (the products of your own imagination) from reality. What remains of a schizophrenic hearing voices when one can now hear one’s voice as someone else’s, or hear their own voice used by someone else? What remains of a schizophrenic seeing things that are not “real” when the new “normal” will be deep fakes and copies of copies with no original? Schizophrenic capitalism is here, it is real, and we must get used to it.

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NOTES:

1: Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and simulation”, Chapter 1: The Precession of Simualcra

2: https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1630262709173248002

3: (NSFW) https://old.reddit.com/r/unstable_diffusion/comments/10th699/strip_club_2_realistic_vision_model/

4: (NSFW) https://old.reddit.com/r/unstable_diffusion/comments/10e8fp9/tatooine_sands_a_star_wars_album/

5: (NSFW) https://old.reddit.com/r/unstable_diffusion/comments/1226s6o/harem_lounging_on_a_portside_balcony_aea4pc/

6: It will take many more years until we will have AI-generated videos that are indistinguishable from reality and that will be easily made by anyone. The images are already here though.

7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6tYy63GLOc

8: https://twitter.com/rpnickson/status/1639813074176679938

9: https://old.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/12rxd0r/universal_music_group_claims_copyright_against/

10: https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/11dbj31/tiktok_releases_new_filter_reality_no_longer/

11: Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus, Chapter 5: The Machines

12: Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus, p.153

13: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/02/transhumanism-is-here-to-stay-were.html