Perhaps one of the most profound dialogues in The Matrix is when Neo is brought to the Construct and Morpheus begins to explain him the very concept of The Matrix.

Neo: This…this isn’t real?

Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today… Welcome.. to the desert.. of the real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.

Neo: AI? You mean artificial intelligence?

Morpheus: A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born. We are grown.

For the longest time I wouldn’t believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living.

And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.

Neo: No. I don’t believe it. It’s not possible.

Morpheus: I didn’t say it would be easy, Neo. I just said it would be the truth.

Neo: No. Stop. Let me out. Let me out. I want out.

 

This was in 1999. AI seemed to be like that object at the horizon, which no matter how much you walked still remained at the horizon. Now in 2026, that the era of AI has begun, and AI based tools have proliferated almost everywhere. Even my SMS app on the phone was being seen as AI enabled. The AI generated media is rapidly saturating all types of online content around us. Even now if you search for anything, many websites, which have excellent SEO scores, pop up with content generated by AI. You have to be careful look for signs if the content is indeed AI generated. As of now there are hints here and there, which are sort of give aways.

But what about 2 years, 5 years, 10 years down the line. Going by the pace of rapid advance in image and video generation in last couple of years, finding if the media has been made ( or made-up?) by AI will be very difficult. We will be really in the post-truth era where veracity of anything will be almost impractical, if not impossible, to determine.

Since AI generation works on the basis of the data that is fed to it in terms of input. The result is a remixing of these inputs in various ways so as to match the input request. So this leads us to question of whether AI can generated anything genuinely novel? Or all it does is regurgitate the existing content, giving it new forms and bells and whistles? Are we going to see media in all forms liquefy the pre-existing text so they could be fed in a never ending loop consumed intravenously by the living humans. Will they know the difference? Will the difference matter at that stage?