What Is Real? How Do You Define Real?

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If you haven’t watched The Matrix recently, it is probably time for a rewatch.

If you’ve never seen the film, you know what you need to do.

For the uninitiated, an expert from Wikipedia:

“The film depicts a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside the Matrix, a simulated reality created by intelligent machines. Believing computer hacker Neo to be "the One" prophesied to defeat them, Morpheus recruits him into a rebellion against the machines.”

The Matrix might be my favourite movie.

I saw it in the theatre several times.

When it came out, after first viewing, I wanted to take everyone I knew to see it. I wanted to share it with everyone.

The year after its release, I organized a group outing for nearly a hundred work friends and colleagues to see The Matrix at the Ontario Place Cinesphere.

Before we had streaming and at a time when I didn’t subscribe to cable, I used my DVD copy of The Matrix as a sleep aid.

I would put that DVD on nightly, usually falling asleep somewhere between Neo's capture by Agent Smith and his awakening in the “real world” on Morpheus’s ship, the Nebuchadnezzar.

Other times, the DVD would repeat, and I would wake up midway through the epic helicopter “catch” scene.

Through exposure or late-night DVD repeat osmosis, I have most of The Matrix script committed to memory.

Admittedly, I am a huge Keanu Reeves fan, and I had a crush on Carrie-Anne Moss.

The combination made the rewatching easy.

But also, the way that movie looked and sounded was unreal.

The soundtrack, the visuals, the attention to detail, it was unlike anything I had seen before (except for maybe Bound, the proto-Matrix experiment the Wachowskis shot a few years earlier).

It is not a stretch to say that the Wachowski siblings changed cinema forever with The Matrix.

The combination of advances in visual effects and never-before-seen filming techniques revised viewers’ (and filmmakers’) understanding of what was possible in film, resetting the bar for action-movie expectations irrevocably.

Then there’s the influence of Jean Baudrillard.

I was nerdy enough and had read enough philosophy books to chuckle every time I watched Neo open the hollowed-out book, a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, to pull out a disc with undisclosed code or data to sell to a drug dealer.

At the risk of failing to reveal the humour of the joke by trying to explain the joke, which might be a joke inside a joke, Simulacra and Simulation is a dense philosophy text about how reality might be an illusion made of symbols.

And Neo is literally a prisoner plugged into a giant networked power plant that forces him to experience a fake, AI-generated simulation of reality (The Matrix), while casually using that exact book, hollowed out as a hiding spot for things that are never explained in the movie or the script.

The symbolism is deep, but the joke is blunt; he’s stashed contraband inside an empty book about how nothing is real.

Ironically, Baudrillard hated The Matrix.

Years after the first movie was released, he quipped that, “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.”

His movie reviews aside, Baudrillard’s work reads pretty prophetic these days.

He noted that “the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network”.

Baudrillard believed that each of us would be in control of a device that would isolate us “in a position of perfect sovereignty”, like “an astronaut in a bubble”, basically predicting our phone and social media addictions.

He further argued that in our postmodern age, our ability to distinguish between reality and illusion would collapse, suggesting that society would emerge in a state of "hyperreality,” a simulated reality that is "more real than real” but disconnected from any true original referent, a copy of a copy of a copy.

But here is what Baudrillard couldn’t have predicted.

Today’s AI tools allow for the creation of so much realistic content so quickly at an “acceptable” level of believability that we are already on the verge of being subsumed in the kind of hyperreality he described.

AI-generated film and video are becoming increasingly realistic. 

But music is another story altogether.

Three songs generated by artificial intelligence topped music charts this week, reaching the top spots on Spotify and Billboard.

We’ve seen AI-generated music do well on streaming before, but it never topped the charts.

Also this week, Deezer released the results of a research study on our perceptions and attitudes towards AI-generated Music.

Participants in Deezer’s study were asked to listen to three tracks and determine whether or not they were fully AI-generated.

Spoiler alert: Baudrillard was right. Nearly all respondents, 97%, failed to identify the artificial music. We can’t tell the difference.

A majority (71%) of the respondents were surprised by these results, and more than half (52%) felt uncomfortable by not being able to tell the difference.

It’s bad news for artists who were already struggling to have their music heard.

But it’s even worse news for all of us if we want to maintain any kind of hold on truth, knowledge and reality.

We are actively replacing the authentic with the synthetic.

Seeing (or hearing) is no longer believing.

Farooq A. Kperogi agrees that we are now fully immersed in Baudrillard’s hyperreality: “What we see, read, and even feel often originates in code, not in life. The hyperreal has triumphed, not necessarily as deception, but as our new normal. We no longer inhabit reality; we curate, filter, and generate it. In this brave new world of the synthetic, we are all living inside the simulation.”

What is your best defence against the hyperreal?

Take off your shoes and socks, put your feet on the ground, pinch yourself, read a real book (made of paper) and feel good about not being plugged into a machine just yet.

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