Everyone’s calling it AI. The movie clips, the weirdly soulful cover songs, the portraits that look more like us than we do. AI wrote this, AI voiced that. AI made the girl from the beer commercial cry.
But I don’t think intelligence covers what we’re seeing now.
Because what we’re seeing lately doesn’t feel like intelligence. It feels like mimicry. A very convincing one. Lifelike, even. But still mimicry.
Run a prompt through Midjourney and you’ll get something stunning—technically brilliant, emotionally resonant, and completely hollow. It doesn’t see the image. It doesn’t choose why to make her eyes tired or the sky a certain shade of longing. It’s just remixing patterns with no sense of stakes.
Same with voice models. You can clone Morgan Freeman and have him narrate your grocery list, but nothing in that voice knows what it’s saying. It sounds like wisdom, but it’s just waveform math wearing a comfy cardigan.
Or take those AI-generated songs that hit Spotify for a week before getting pulled—uncanny ballads in the voice of a dead artist, trained on their catalog like it’s compost. It’s not art. It’s a deepfake with a backbeat.
This isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s artificial presence—machines designed to look and sound like they’re here with us. Like they care. But they don’t. Because they can’t. Not yet.
And calling it AI muddies the waters. It gives the illusion of cognition where there’s only simulation. These tools can dazzle. They can even move us. But they don’t mean anything. They don’t hold a belief. They don’t push back.
Real intelligence argues with itself. It hesitates. It surprises. These systems just complete the pattern, however convincingly.
That’s why I think we need a different name. Not just for accuracy’s sake, but because words shape how we respond. If we keep pretending we’re talking to minds, we’ll forget that we’re not. And that opens the door to a thousand little seductions—trust, empathy, influence—all built on a mirage.
So no, I don’t think this is AI. I think it’s bio-mimicry for culture. A parrot with a poetry degree. A mirror that flatters instead of reflects.
Impressive? Absolutely.
Intelligent? Not yet.