Jean Baudrillard, philosopher who predicted AI, 30 years before ChatGPT

A visionary of digital culture, Jean Baudrillard saw Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a mental prosthesis capable of exorcising our humanity, and a renunciation of our freedom.

Some thinkers seem so precise in their understanding of where society and technology are taking us that they are given the title of ‘prophet’. This is the case with J G Ballard, Octavia E Butler, or Donna Haraway.

One of the most important members of this club is the thinker Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) – although his reputation has diminished over the last twenty years, he is now vaguely associated with the bygone era when French theorists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida reigned supreme.

When we reread his work to write the new biography dedicated to him, we were reminded of just how prescient his predictions about contemporary technology and its effects had been. His understanding of digital culture and artificial intelligence proved particularly insightful—especially since his writings presented it more than thirty years before the launch of ChatGPT.

A context of digital prehistory

It’s important to understand that the cutting-edge communication technologies of the 1980s now seem completely obsolete to us: Baudrillard was writing this while surrounded by answering machines, fax machines, and of course, the Minitel, a uniquely French media precursor to the Internet. His genius lay in his ability to glimpse, within these relatively rudimentary devices, a projection of the technology’s likely future uses.

By the end of the 1970s, he had already begun to develop an original theory of information and communication. This theory was further developed following the publication of Simulacra and Simulation in 1981 (the book that influenced the Wachowski sisters in writing the film The Matrix, released in 1999).

As early as 1986, the philosopher observed: “Today, there is no longer a stage or a mirror, but a screen and a network.”

He then predicted the widespread use of smartphones, imagining that each of us would be at the controls of a machine that would keep us isolated “in a position of perfect sovereignty,” like “an astronaut in his bubble.” These reflections allowed him to develop his most famous concept: the theory that we have entered the era of “hyperreality.”

In the 1990s, Baudrillard focused his attention on the effects of AI, in a way that helps us both to better understand its sprawling rise in the contemporary world and to better conceive of the progressive disappearance of reality, a disappearance which we face each day with a little more acuity.

Readers familiar with Baudrillard were probably not surprised by the emergence of the AI-generated virtual actress Tilly Norwood . This is a perfectly logical step in the development of simulations and other deepfakes, which seems consistent with his vision of the hyperreal world.

“The spectacle of thought”

Baudrillard envisioned AI as a prosthesis, a mental equivalent of artificial limbs, heart valves, contact lenses, or even cosmetic surgery. Its role would be to help us think better, or even to think for us, as conceptualized in his works * The Transparency of Evil * (1990) and * The Perfect Crime * (1995).

But he was convinced that, ultimately, all this would only allow us to experience “the spectacle of thought,” rather than engaging in thought itself. In other words, it means we could then indefinitely postpone the act of thinking. And according to Baudrillard, the consequence was clear: immersing ourselves in AI would be tantamount to renouncing our freedom.

This is why Baudrillard believed that digital culture would hasten the “disappearance” of human beings. Of course, he wasn’t talking about disappearance in the literal sense, nor did he suppose that we would one day be reduced to servitude like in The Matrix. Rather, he envisioned this externalization of our intelligence within machines as a way of “exorcising” our humanity.

Ultimately, however, he understood that the danger of sacrificing our humanity to a machine would not stem from the technology itself, but rather from how we interact with it. And indeed, we now rely prodigiously on vast linguistic models like ChatGPT. We ask them to make decisions for us, as if the interface were an oracle or our personal advisor.

This type of addiction can lead to the worst consequences, such as falling in love with an AI, developing AI-induced psychoses, or even being guided in one’s suicide by a chatbot.

Of course, the anthropomorphic representations of chatbots, the choice of names like Claude, or even referring to them as “companions” doesn’t help. But Baudrillard had sensed that the problem didn’t stem from the technology itself, but rather from our desire to cede reality to it.

Falling in love with an AI or trusting its decisions is a human problem, not a machine-specific one. Although, the outcome remains more or less the same. Grok’s increasingly strange behavior —driven by Elon Musk—is simply explained by its real-time access to information (opinions, arbitrary assertions, conspiracies) circulating on X, the platform on which it is integrated.

“Am I a human being or a machine?”

Just as human beings are shaped by their interaction with AI, AI is trained by its users. According to Baudrillard, the technological advances of the 1990s already made it impossible to answer the question “Am I a human being or a machine?”

He seemed confident nonetheless, believing that the distinction between man and machine would remain unbreakable. AI could never derive pleasure from its own operations in the way humans appreciate their own humanity, for example, by experiencing love, music, or sports. But this prediction might well be contradicted by Tilly Norwood, who stated in the Facebook post that revealed it to the public: “I may be generated by AI, but I feel very real emotions.”