Even an illusion has a basis in reality. Recently, I watched a cardinal attack its own reflection in a car mirror, mistaking its appearance for another bird. Human beings make similar mistakes in subtler ways. Every work of art appears to place another consciousness before us.

Whether watching a magic trick or standing before a painting, we know that beneath the illusion lies an actual human mind making deliberate choices. The illusion is an expression of reality. Artificial intelligence reverses this relationship. It produces something that resembles the products of human consciousness while entirely lacking the conscious reality from which those products arise. It is appearance detached from being — an effect without a cause. It is, ultimately, a simulacrum.

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This distinction is existential. Every human relationship depends upon the silent assumption that another conscious subject stands opposite us. The words spoken, the music performed, the painting admired, all point toward the person whose lived experience gave form to meaning. Meaning is never contained solely within the object; it also resides in the consciousness that created it and the one that receives it. Art is an act of mutual recognition.

There are, of course, individuals with whom our ability to communicate is profoundly limited — an infant, or the severely brain-injured. Yet we do not love them less. Our relationship is not founded solely upon communication, but upon participation in the same reality. We are individuals exposed to the same mortality, suffering, and fragile condition of existence. Even in silence, they remain bound to us by a communion of being.

Artificial intelligence shares none of this. It knows neither vulnerability nor mortality. It has never anticipated death, mourned a loss, endured failure, or waited in hope. It does not inhabit existence; it........

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