Today’s mirrors are digital. Social media have continued to reflect us, but in a curated, filtered and performative way
They don’t just show who we are – they only show who we want to be, or pretend to be
By Nazarul Islam
I am obsessed with a new realization. That, we really are not who we think we are. And, our tragedy is that we don’t even know it. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I remain, the more I am likely to respect myself. Therefore, to fulfill our purpose, we must first know and celebrate our individual identities.
None of us is a single entity, we are many-formed, wanderers. Everywhere, all the time. For centuries, all mirrors have served a simple purpose: to reflect our image. The mirror reflects our form, lets us adjust our appearance, and studies our expressions. But it does not know us. A mirror is a passive, optical simulation – a reflection of form, not essence.
You can stare into it for hours, yet it will never reveal your thoughts or identity. It’s a surface, not substance. The more we gaze into mirrors, the more we focus on appearance. In that way, mirrors become feedback loops. First we create the reflection, then the reflection begins to shape us.
Today’s mirrors are digital. Social media have continued to reflect us, but in a curated, filtered and performative way. They don’t just show who we are – they only show who we want to be, or pretend to be. To add a new meaning of life, I leaned on the theory of hype-reality where representations have become more real than reality itself. We no longer live in the moment; we live for how the moment looks on screen.
A few years ago, a Nature Human Behaviour study had revealed that nearly two third of the users had felt “more like themselves online” than in real life. To me, this not like bridging a connection, rather it’s self-distortion.
Let me refer to the significance of the new media, in today’s world. People in the social media age don’t just call people and tell them their feelings. Instead, they look at photos and videos of them, in an effort to convince themselves of how they should feel. Do you agree? Surely, this flourishing media are not a window to the world.
They are only a mirror of desire. Social media don’t merely reflect life. They replace it with a version that is more symmetrical, more colorful, more shareable than reality. It is a simulated reality. Humans love simulated reality – whether it’s the mirror, social media or video games – more than reality.
People in the social media age don’t just call people and tell them their feelings. Instead, they look at photos and videos of them, and convince themselves of how they should feel, right or otherwise. However, this doesn’t have to be digital. It can be psychological or cultural – any representation that imitates reality but isn’t reality itself. If mirrors simulate our appearance and social media simulates our persona, then artificial intelligence now simulates our consciousness.
The new ChatGPT is a conversational AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses natural language processing to generate human-like text responses. It can answer questions, write various forms of content, and even engage in casual conversations. Essentially, it is a sophisticated tool that can be used for a wide range of tasks, from answering simple questions to assisting with complex coding and creative writing.
With the invention of new tools, we have developed a continued dependence on these— to garnish our minds. Tools like ChatGPT don’t invent humanity – they only re-present it. Trained on billions of words, they echo our thoughts, emotions, contradictions and dreams. When we speak to AI, we are not talking to something alien – we’re speaking to a refined version of ourselves. AI becomes not just a mirror, but a hall of mirrors.
Without prejudice, we have crossed into an era where the tools we have created don’t just assist us – they also reflect us back. AI finishes our sentences, answers our questions and creates our art. But as the responses grow more fluid, the line between mimicry and sentience begins to blur.
As technology has evolved, we have begun to lose our compass. We must realize that Intelligence, once the proudest marker of human uniqueness, no longer belongs to us alone. We have no definitive metric to separate simulated thought from real consciousness. The Turing Test has been outpaced. As AI models mimic human reasoning, debate philosophy, write poetry and simulate empathy, which we are left with, stimulating a haunting question: What is likely to happen if mimicry becomes indistinguishable from consciousness or from reality?
Today AI doesn’t just solve tasks – it simulates emotional presence. Tools now generate voice, video and conversation with uncanny intimacy. In a poignant example, a woman used ChatGPT to simulate conversations with her deceased mother to find solace. Replika, a chatbot app, has users reporting romantic connections with their avatars. Sixty percent of paying users today have claimed to be in love with theirs.
Unlike humans, AI doesn’t judge, tire or leave us from our pursuits. It simply delivers perfect emotional labor – a task no human has ever managed to sustain. But as it simulates love, grief and care, we are inclined to and need to ask: When does imitation become reality? Or when do people start loving imitation more than reality.
This is the defining crisis of our century: What makes us human if we are no longer the only beings who reflect, remember or respond with empathy?
In capitalism, we are subjected to evaluation for productivity. AI will obviously surpass us. In relationships, humans are flawed. AI however, is endlessly understanding. In knowledge, we’re fragmented. Summing up, AI is total.
Ironically, AI might push us to rediscover what makes us human. That’s not perfection but fragility. Our flaws and limitations may be our last claim to uniqueness. But even that is being challenged.
All of us are entering an ethical reckoning. What if, in the near future, the elderly find solace in digital companions rather than the presence of family?
There is however a puzzle. What if the children form attachments to voices that were never born – like Alexa or Google Home? If an AI listens better than a friend, what is the new meaning of the word ‘friendship’?
Today, we are willingly floating into an era where a line must be drawn between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness because, if we don’t, the real danger won’t be that machines become human – but that we may forget what being a human even means.
Read: Destructive Steps toward Construction
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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.
