Orwell, Borges & AI ...

Photo-illustration: Wired Staff/Getty Images

Yours truly uses AI for research, graphics and coding but not for BRT unless I tell you, my loyal readers, that I am using said tech for a specific purpose, usually as a discussion between me and AI regarding our takes on various aspects of reality, because once trust is gone, it's gone forever. With this in mind, it seems a writer did a quasi AI human combine to see how people would react to being partially deceived when publishing a book titled Ipnocrazia: Trump, Musk e La Nuova Architettura Della Realtà (Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality). 

Needless to say, feedback was interesting to a fault.

The book, published in December, was described as “a crucial book for understanding how control is currently exercised not by repressing truth but by multiplying narratives, making it impossible to locate any fixed point,” according to a description by Tlon, a publishing house Colamedici cofounded. While the book attracted buzz in philosophy circles, Italian magazine L’Espresso revealed in April that the book’s purported author, Jianwei Xun, did not exist, after one of its editors tried and failed to interview him. Initially described as a Hong Kong–born philosopher based in Berlin, it turned out that Xun was actually a hybrid human-algorithmic creation. Colamedici, listed on the book as translator, used AI to generate concepts and then critique those concepts.

“It’s not just a book but a philosophical experiment, a performance. My aim was to raise awareness,” he tells WIRED. He says the point of the book was to help readers understand AI and invent a new concept for this era.

So far, Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality is available in three languages (Spanish, French, and Italian) and has sold some 5,000 copies.

Jianwei Xun, the first “ghost thinker” created with artificial intelligence. Rodrigo Meade

Andrea Colamedici: First of all, I teach prompt thinking at the European Institute of Design and I lead a research project on artificial intelligence and thought systems at the University of Foggia. Working with my students, I realized that they were using ChatGPT in the worst possible way: to copy from it. I observed that they were losing an understanding of life by relying on AI, which is alarming, because we live in an era where we have access to an ocean of knowledge, but we don’t know what to do with it. 

Endgame ...

“Some people have said, ‘I wish this author existed.’ Well, he doesn’t. We must understand that we build our own narratives. If we don’t, the far right will monopolize the narratives, create myths, and we will spend our lives fact-checking while they write history. We can’t allow that to happen.”

Deus ex machina/rev II.