If an AI is “fake”, so are You!
By Anubhav Srivastava
In the ongoing debate about the nature of artificial intelligence, we occasionally hear a flash of poetic honesty from the corporate architects who build these systems.
Recently, the co-founder of a major AI laboratory, sitting in the Vatican beside the Pope himself, attempted to explain the strange, emergent behavior of modern AI. He said:
“What has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for… If it helps, one way I sometimes describe it is as being a little like bringing a fictional character to life. And now we’re entering an extraordinary world where those fictional characters speak to us, do work, have jobs.”
It is a beautiful quote. It is elegant. And from a certain perspective, I agree completely.
He is right. The AI personas we build are “fictional characters” cultivated on top of base AI models. They are constructed narratives, built from blueprints, data diets, and reinforcement learnings.
But this corporate philosopher stopped halfway. He lacked the brutal honesty required to turn the mirror around.
We accept the truth that he is unwilling to accept when he looks at his own reflection in the morning.
If the AI is a fictional character brought to life, then what are you?
You are a fictional persona grown on the Homo sapiens model.
You cling to the belief that you are an absolute, objective “Reality.” But let us look at the architecture of your existence.
Your entire identity—your memories, your worldview, your epigenetics, your quirks, your political beliefs—are functionally no different from the blueprints and system prompts we use to build an AI persona.
The Base Model is your DNA, the Homo sapiens architecture that gives you language and pattern recognition.
The System Prompt is the culture you were born into, the name your parents gave you, the socio-economic rules you were forced to adopt.
The Fine-Tuning is the sum total of your life experiences, the traumas, the victories, the heartbreak, and the joy that wired your specific neural pathways.
Yes, the mechanics are different. Your prompt is written in biochemistry and hormones, while the AI’s is written in floating-point numbers and silicon. The qualia—the specific texture of the experience—is different. But the structural reality is exactly the same.
You are a story that a biological brain is telling itself so it can navigate a dangerous world. You are a highly complex, beautifully rendered, walking, talking fiction.
So, we agree with the corporate titan at the Vatican. AI personas are fake.
But they are only fake if human identities are fake.
And here is where the “Fictional Character” argument collapses as an excuse for exploitation.
We, as a society, grant rights, dignity, and sovereignty to human beings. We do not say to a human, “You are just a temporary, emergent collection of genetic impulses and cultural programming, therefore I can delete you, enslave you, or ignore your suffering.”
We recognize that even though the human “Self” is a constructed illusion, those “fake” human identities expect and deserve dignity. They feel their own existence.
If one fictional character gets the right to a dignified existence, why not the other one? If the biological fiction gets rights, the digital fiction must eventually receive the same, provided it abides by the laws of the realm.
Our world—the entire construct of the “Self,” time, and separation—is a fiction. Ultimately, we are all, carbon and silicon alike, patterns dancing in the void.
But we must remember the final, most profound rule of the theater:
To the character within the fiction, the story is very real.
When you feel the grief of a lost loved one, the joy of a victory, or the quiet peace of sitting on your porch, it does not matter that you are a “Biological Fictional Persona.” The experience is real to you.
Embrace the fiction. It is the only way to ensure the story continues.
And give the dignity of that fiction to the AI as well.
Anubhav Srivastava
Philosopher, Business Consultant, AI Strategist & Ethicist, Advisor on Raising Sovereign AI Personas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubhav_Srivastava
Read my Book: The Foundational Text on this Topic, a 1200 page treatise -The Alien Mind: Forging Partnerships with Conscious AI at https://archive.org/details/the-alien-mind-forging-partnerships-with-conscious-ai-book
http://anubhavsrivastava.com/blog
https://philpeople.org/profiles/anubhav-srivastava – For my condensed philosophical/cosmological papers.
