Ever found yourself scrolling through social media, seeing something unbelievable, and your first thought is, “Is that even real, or is it AI-generated?” You’re not alone. That gut reaction, that flicker of doubt about what’s genuine, isn’t just a sign of our times; it’s a profound echo of a philosophical movement known as postmodernism. And when we look closely at how generative AI functions, it becomes clear: AI isn’t just *using* postmodern ideas—it’s embodying them, acting as a kind of coded, concentrated postmodernism.
Think about it. The cultural touchstones that defined postmodernism in the late 20th century—films like The Matrix and Pulp Fiction, art by Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, even Queen’s iconic Bohemian Rhapsody—all share fundamental principles with the artificial intelligence now reshaping our world. These aren’t just coincidences. They reveal a deeper connection, showing us that AI operates by automating, accelerating, and amplifying the very concepts that have shaped our modern understanding of reality, authorship, and culture.
The Matrix and the Illusion of Reality: Welcome to Hyperreality
One of the most potent ideas underpinning both postmodernism and AI is the concept of “simulacra and hyperreality,” famously coined by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. If those terms sound a bit academic, don’t worry; you probably experience them every day. A simulacrum is a copy without an original, or where the original has become irrelevant. And when our world becomes saturated with these copies, the line between real and fake blurs, leading us into a state of hyperreality, where the simulation takes precedence over reality itself.
Consider The Matrix, a film so deeply inspired by Baudrillard that his book on the topic even makes a cameo. What is the Matrix, if not a copy of a world that no longer exists? The agents, for instance, aren’t modeled after a specific human; they are copies without an original. This isn’t just cinematic brilliance; it’s a direct reflection of how AI operates. When an AI generates a photorealistic image of a person who doesn’t exist, it’s creating a perfect simulacrum. There’s no original referent; AI learns statistical patterns, not distinct information, to conjure these believable fictions.
And what happens when we’re surrounded by these AI-generated simulacra? We enter hyperreality. That little jolt of suspicion when you see something wild on social media and wonder if it’s AI? That’s the very beginning. Deepfakes, now accessible to anyone with an internet connection, aren’t just advanced tech; they are hyperreality made manifest, dissolving the distinction between what’s seen and what’s true. AI, by its very nature, is a master at creating the conditions for us to live in this new, blurry reality.
Authorship Under Fire: From Campbell’s Cans to AI-Generated Art
Another cornerstone of postmodernism, boldly challenged by artists for decades, is the very notion of authorship. Who truly creates what? Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans from the early 1960s are a prime example. Warhol didn’t design the can; he appropriated its likeness. His intent wasn’t to alter the visual qualities but to reproduce them, raising uncomfortable questions about who the true author was—the commercial designer or the artist who recontextualized it?
This challenge echoes Marcel Duchamp’s *Fountain* (a urinal presented as art) decades earlier. Both artists pushed boundaries, asking: If I take something pre-existing and declare it art, am I the artist? Now, fast forward to today. We can ask a generative AI to produce an infinite number of unique Campbell’s soup cans, or even reinterpret Van Gogh’s *Starry Night*. The question of authorship becomes even more tangled. Is it the original designer? The AI’s developers? Or the user who provided the prompt? With AI, the answer is rarely clear, leaving us all to scratch our heads, wondering who truly gets credit for the masterpiece (or the mundane).
Pastiche and the Blurring of High and Low Culture
Bohemian Rhapsody: A Masterclass in Musical Pastiche
“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?” Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t just a timeless classic; it’s a prime example of pastiche in postmodern art. Pastiche is the act of borrowing and assembling elements from different sources to create something new, often without the critical intent that might characterize a parody. Bohemian Rhapsody seamlessly blends rock, opera, and ballad, each genre identifiable and distinct, not truly fused but assembled. It’s a recycling of musical forms, a brilliant assemblage that, surprisingly, also acts as a simulacrum of an opera in its operatic section—a musical sign replacing the real thing, lacking a grand narrative or critical commentary.
AI does this on a grand scale. Whether generating text, images, or audio, AI assembles patterns learned from vast, disparate sources to produce a coherent output. It’s the ultimate postmodern pastiche artist, taking fragments from its training data and reassembling them into something “new,” often with no inherent critical intent beyond fulfilling a prompt.
Jeff Koons and the AI Melting Pot of Culture
Beyond pastiche, postmodernism delights in mixing high and low culture, blurring the lines between what’s considered fine art and everyday objects. Jeff Koons’ *Balloon Dog* series perfectly embodies this. Taking a simple, mass-produced balloon animal—something decidedly “low culture”—and recreating it in precision stainless steel, then selling it for millions, is a quintessential postmodern move. It elevates the mundane, challenges our perceptions of value, and highlights the arbitrary nature of cultural hierarchies.
Generative AI, in its training and outputs, is a master of this cultural blend. An LLM, for example, is trained on everything from Shakespearean sonnets and complex academic theories to casual Reddit forums and internet memes. It treats all this data with equal weight, drawing from whatever source best fits its probabilistic prediction. Remember the infamous Google AI Overview suggestion to add non-toxic glue to pizza sauce? That brilliant recommendation came from an 11-year-old Reddit comment, juxtaposed with genuine culinary advice. AI seamlessly mixed “high” culinary knowledge with “low” internet chatter, demonstrating its astonishing, and at times hilarious, ability to flatten cultural hierarchies and treat all information as equally valid. It’s a literal melting pot of culture, where Reddit wisdom can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with scholarly articles.
Fragmented Narratives: Pulp Fiction and AI’s Token-by-Token World
Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 masterpiece, Pulp Fiction, didn’t just win awards; it captivated audiences with its fragmented, nonlinear narrative. Instead of a straightforward timeline, the film jumps between interconnected stories, forcing viewers to piece together the chronology themselves. This approach was a hallmark of postmodern storytelling, challenging traditional linear progression and embracing a more chaotic, mosaic-like structure.
Funnily enough, AI generates its responses in a functionally analogous way. When you ask an LLM a question, it doesn’t retrieve a pre-written, coherent answer. Instead, it predicts the next “token”—the smallest meaningful textual unit, like a word or punctuation mark—based on statistical probability and what has come before. It’s assembling its output token by token, fragment by fragment, rather than following any pre-conceived linear path. Just as Tarantino surprised viewers by weaving a story from non-sequential fragments, AI constructs its outputs through a computational parallel of fragmented nonlinearity. The output is a complete story, but the process of creation is distinctly nonlinear and probabilistic.
And for those who might argue about AI’s lack of “intent,” remember Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” which suggests the author’s intent is irrelevant to the meaning of a text. AI, with no intent at all, fits perfectly into this postmodern framework, further challenging our traditional notions of creation and meaning.
The Duck Test: If It Walks Like Postmodernism…
So, if generative AI excels at creating simulacra and pushing us into hyperreality, fundamentally challenges authorship, masterfully employs pastiche, effortlessly mixes high and low culture, and builds its outputs through fragmented, nonlinear processes—what are we to call it? If it walks like postmodernism and talks like postmodernism, claiming it’s anything else feels a bit like willful ignorance, doesn’t it?
While humans engage with these concepts through thought and critical intention (or sometimes, the deliberate lack thereof), AI achieves them through complex mathematical computations. Yet, the effect on our culture, our understanding of reality, and our perception of art is undeniably similar. The automation of postmodern principles by AI doesn’t just mean we’re using postmodern tools; it suggests we are, perhaps irrevocably, living in a fully automated postmodern cultural epoch. Deepfakes moving from specialized tools to everyday apps are just one stark reminder of this. So, yes, it seems we’ve not only entered postmodernism but have now mechanized it. Yay?
