From Plato's "cave" to Baudrillard's hyperreality in the era of generative artificial intelligence

Abstract

The latest information technologies have caused a fundamental ontological shift, accelerating changes in the structure of objective reality and reorganizing education, science, and society as a whole. The rapid expansion of new technologies into all spheres of human life necessitates a fundamental rethinking of classical ontological categories. Research methodology. When writing the article, a number of methodological approaches were used: discursive analysis - to study the concepts of "simulacrum / hyperreality"; system-structural approach - to determine the structure of modern society; network approach - in the study of the network, which has become the morphology of society; E-Social Science method for analyzing the electronic Internet behavior of bloggers in real time. The article also uses synergetic methodology, philosophical, general scientific and specific scientific methods, in particular, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, generalization and analogy. Conclusions and prospects for further research. The latest information technologies have led to a new level of human existence, which has moved from the era of the original to the era of the copy, replacing the real with the hyperreal. The modern “digital cave,” shaped by recommendation algorithms and generative artificial intelligence (AI), has proven to be much more effective than Platonic’s, as it doesn’t simply distort the truth, but replaces it with a comfortable, hyperreal copy. In this environment, simulacra acquire the status of self-sufficient entities that function regardless of the presence of a physical original, blurring the line between fact and its algorithmic imitation. Digital algorithms atomize society, locking everyone in a private hallucination, where truth is replaced by personalized confirmation of one's own illusions. At the same time, the process of digitalization leads to a crisis of subjectivity: delegating creative and cognitive functions to neural networks provokes not only the "death of the author", but also the erosion of the individual's moral responsibility. A person in the infosphere gradually loses the role of an autonomous demiurge, becoming part of a closed cycle of sign exchange. The epistemological crisis caused by the loss of the referent endangers the institutions of science and journalism, turning truth into the result of technological convention. It has been proven that the main challenge of our time is not so much the technical improvement of AI systems, but the search for new ethical and anthropological principles for preserving the "human". Therefore, further exploration should be aimed at developing strategies for desimulation and restoring the critical distance between the subject and the digital interface.