plato warned us about chatgpt

on the worship of shadows

I’ve been thinking about things that are real. Seeing them and recognizing them and preferring them over their inferior copies/illusions/shadows. The opposite of reality not as untruth but as a creeping fogginess in our peripheral vision.

Something I’m never not thinking about btw.

Part of this little fixation I’ll chalk up to something that is not in the least bit new in me—the belief that widespread use of generative AI is not-so-gradually rotting our brains and our ability to identify truth, as opposed to the mere illusion of the same. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll know this. I wrote broadly about my contempt for genAI for the first time in May 2024, during and following a trip to Seattle, and when it comes to the subject it’s been rough sailing ever since.

Personally, the issue has only become even thornier to navigate, not because I’ve started using genAI myself¹ but because so much of my social network has openly made it an everyday part of their personal and professional lives. It makes me a nightmare dinner party guest, because try as I do to bite my tongue, and believe me I do try, I at some point cannot help coming out with a casual and not at all offensive “oh, so you’re okay then, with the knowledge that you’re getting stupider every day, you’re saying you’re okay with that?” And I know, I know, there’s the whole honey > vinegar thing, but for some crazy reason I continue to believe in the notion of my friends possessing a moral and ethical imperative higher than that of BEES and their pollination needs. Sorry!!! I guess I’m whimsical like that! Idealism hates to see me coming!

(Let me tell you something: sometimes I think it’s a miracle I still have any friends.)

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Of course, copies and dupe culture are nothing new. I remember back in the early 2000s, when I was first getting into beauty—and can we for a second despair at the makeup industry’s audacity to insist on classifying itself as Beauty? I just know contouring palettes from Sephora were not what Aphrodite wanted for us—the pervasive and nigh-obsessive hunt for the drugstore versions of the MAC eyeshadows most of us teenagers watching YouTube tutorials simply did not have the funds to afford. I recall Sam Edelman shamelessly copying popular models of expensive shoes (something I can only assume the brand is still doing because if-it-ain’t-broke, etc.) so that those of us who couldn’t shill upwards of $500 for a pair of shoes could still be trendy by adopting the consumption style, if not the actual products consumed, of the wealthy.

If your purchasing power couldn’t let you be cool, then it was just as important, if not more so, to affect coolness.

The overwhelming use of ChatGPT and its kin has taken this to the next level: for many, it is now sufficient not to be well-informed, but to affect knowledge; not to be an artist, but to affect creativity. Through a process of collective laziness, the appearance of the thing has become as good as the thing itself.

Mostly unrelated. I just liked the idea of lemon and orange trees side by side.

There’s a phrase in Spanish that I’ve found challenging to translate; it’s one of those sayings of whose origin I remain unclear—if my parents made it up or if it’s part of the gorgeously penitent Catholic culture that rears its ugly head when we least expect it. When calling my brother and me out for something that in their opinion we hadn’t given sufficient thought, felt badly enough about, my parents would say “te perdonas muy fácil,” which roughly translates to “you forgive yourself too easily.”²

Whatever its genesis, it’s a useful phrase.³ It suggests that self-indulgence possesses a saturation point. Our inability to sustain even a modicum of double, double toil and trouble, to remember that to live is at least partly to claw at our limitations—with efforts that can only be rewarding because they are steady and grueling—until we breach them, is leading us into murky waters.

From last week, just speaking of murky waters but also my deep attachment to sunsets.

We became so accepting of copies we didn’t even realize when they started overcoming the original forms. Now we’re struggling to tell them apart. Socrates warned us about this.

Can you imagine if I was suddenly like “so in the allegory of the cave, Plato wrote that …” Even if you were, by some miracle, still reading this, such intolerable pedantry would cause you to stop. And I’d understand it. Lest we forget that, above all, I remain an empath.⁴

What I will say, if you’ll allow me, is this: we’re growing so comfortable with the shadows and the echoes we’re running the risk of forgetting about the real forms underlying the former. We’re surrendering to the false inevitability of the dupe, consenting to the redefinition of Original as inclusive of Imitation. By so doing, we’re letting go of the inherent value of truth. Worse, we’re participating in this dilution of reality—by allowing our disdain for friction and effort to run our lives, we’re assisting in the reframing of our own surroundings, telling our politicians and the businesses that sponsor them that we don’t mind, actually, if the outlines of what’s true blur a little. If they stretch beyond the confines of what our eyes can see and our ears can hear. Beyond recognition of the reality on which the manufactured images were based. It’s fine. We’ve prepared ourselves for just this outcome.

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Over the last few days, I’ve seen everyone and their mother share that 1984 quote, giving it the Pinterest infographic treatment before posting it to their story. You know what, I don’t want to leave any room for confusion—let’s all turn to the same page. This is the quote:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. (George Orwell, 1984)

I don’t want to be mean or inconsiderate. I do understand why the first quote is being shared. Very much. It makes sense given the current American administration’s insistence that what we see and hear is not what we actually see and hear: the phone we can clearly see in Alex Pretti’s hand was actually a gun, Trump’s goons tell us, so you see, the ICE agents who pulled the trigger were justified;⁵ Renée Good’s car was running over the ICE agent, you see, even if the videos—from multiple angles—show she was only verbally mocking him (legal, btw, if not a moral requirement) and records don’t show the ICE agent required medical attention following the interaction, but he felt threatened, so you understand, don’t you, Kristi Noem insists—the four shots aimed at an unarmed woman were not only warranted, they were necessary.

Distrust in reality has allowed doubt to be fabricated from thin air.

On the Rarity of Sunny Days (2026).

So yes, I’m glad we have enough awareness to recognize that we’re being told to perceive things that are not there. I’m glad that Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts doctrine, debuted nearly a decade ago, is being challenged.

However. The same folks who’ll solemnly share the 1984 quote (“so true,” “this,” “don’t look away”) will turn around and in the same breath mention that they “asked ChatGPT” to do x, y, zed, in utter oblivion to the inconsistency.

Like, babes, I hate to tell you this, but the party is relying on you to blur the lines that will later serve to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Is it surprising, when by our warm welcomes of genAI into our daily lives we’re signaling how resigned we’ve become to an absence of reality? An absence of humanity? My beautiful, dear, innocent-but-not-stupid-so-let’s-be-careful-now siblings in Christ: the call is coming from inside the house!!

There’s a better, more applicable 1984 quote, if I may, that appeals to the utter inanity of the Both Sides approach to journalism we’ve been urged to accept and expect over the last couple of decades.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. (George Orwell, 1984)

CNN will one day answer for its crimes, I’ll tell you that much.

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It’s not too late, though. There is a perceptible resistance to the dupefication of our lives. If in the cave allegory, it is the Sun that finally reveals the shadows to be the copies they indeed are, then in our present crisis of reality it is now Nature, arguably an extension of the Sun, revealing the same. I think it’s why so many people have become adamant about “going analog” in the last year or so. When you’re sitting in the cool shadow of a tree’s green canopy, reading a paperback, holding a loved one’s hand, knitting a warm scarf—the very tactility of a so-called “analog life” means that you don’t have to wonder if what you’re looking at and experiencing is real. You’re feeling it.⁶

This is what my environs look like 99.9% of the time btw, speaking of tactility.

That’s why I’m not really hopeless on this matter. Say you make frequent—daily, even!—use of genAI. Who’s to say you can’t course-correct? A part of you, however subconscious, still values that which is true. We can lean into that. To retrain our eyes and ears to differentiate between simulation and reality, and by our actions and interactions demonstrate, to ourselves and to the companies and governments trying to assert otherwise, that the distinction still matters.

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1. Do you know how stubborn I am? Do you know how long and how tightly I will grasp my little principles, no matter how many friends I lose along the way? For-e-ver. I pretended not to like key lime pie, a literal heavenly dessert, for years, all because I said I didn’t like it one (1) time as a child and didn’t want to give my parents the satisfaction of having successfully changed my mind. Do not test me.

2. Which is a wild thing to say to a child, to be honest! I’m pretty sure I said it to someone—an adult, to be clear—in a fit of pique last year and it was only hours later that I was like, oh, wait, that’s probably not a thing that normal people say to each other. But here we are.

3. Just to close the loop on the Catholicism of it all, in Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, there’s a line that says “forgiving (not like God, but like the devil),” suggesting that forgiveness is not always divinely ordained. Sometimes it is an overly-obliging shortcut. My parents would approve.

4. You can and should, however, read Plato’s Republic … I’m sorry, you just should. Books I, VI, and VII specifically will not let you down! I’m not going to link to it because shame is something I still feel. Still: hop into your nearest used bookstore, there’s a 99.9% chance they’ll have a gorgeous little pre-annotated copy.

5. I’m aware of the new videos from 11 days prior to Pretti’s shooting that allegedly show him scuffling with Border Patrol agents. Beyond the fact that a suspected prior act of aggression does not give the state leave to extrajudicially execute you for a separate act of aggression, there is also the legal concept, and you may have heard of this one, of innocent until proven guilty, placing the burden of proof on the state; it’s a concept that makes sense given the fact that the state, and not the civilian, is the party with the power of the police and military force at its disposal. Logic and reason, babes, another thing Socrates talked about. This is not legal advice, etc.

6. I do think the whole analog obsession is being taken slightly too far. Might be over-correcting, imho. Like. Let’s relax for a second.