Comment The Postmodernist French philosopher Jean Baudrillard was known for his concept of hyperreality, where the real and imaginary are confused.

"It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real," he wrote in Simulation and Simulacra.

In other words, the derealization of reality. Thanks to Silicon Valley money people, advances in compute power, and the explosive development of generative artificial intelligence, this is our life now.

These days we can easily envision a world where we won't know whether what we are interacting with is real or pretending to be real. Will it matter?

Nowhere is this near-future more keenly felt than the newly launched Chat2024.com, which promises to "cut through the noise" by offering "meaningful conversations with the 2024 Presidential candidates." It even suggests that you can "ask questions, gain clarity, and be an informed voter" by using the free service.

But it doesn't give you a one-to-one hotline to a certain Florida resident, of course not. What you're talking to is a chatbot intensely trained on his media appearances and writings, able to somewhat faithfully reproduce his quirks, mannerisms, and policies.

"Every Party, Every Voice, Authentically Represented," the website proclaims, and you can indeed ask questions of simulacra of every declared presidential candidate in the US 2024 election, either individually or all at once, and receive answers in text and audio. It also provides citations and sources, like the Edge browser's Bing chat feature, so you can figure out for yourself whether Joe BAIden is having a full-on hallucinatory meltdown.

But this isn't Microsoft's doing. The company powering the project is Delphi, which suggests that the "the brightest minds... scale their time, infinitely." Its tagline is "Clone Yourself" - digitally - and is obviously aimed at media personalities who want to make an easy buck off their fans without the indignity of actually having to interact with them.

So, to answer your question, yes, someone has been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. That someone is me, Donald Trump.

The idea isn't exclusive to Delphi. Forever Voices grabbed headlines this year by producing apps for "influencers" Caryn Marjorie (Snapchat) and Kaitlyn Siragusa (Twitch), which, with two-way voice communication, were billed as "virtual girlfriends" based on sad, lonely men's obsessions. Both charge $1 a minute and require funds to be paid upfront.

Nor is Chat2024 particularly original. In fact, it smacks of Gen Z shitposting with off-the-shelf AI products to represent Obama, Trump, and Biden as warring gamers. Witness their
tense debate over which Soulsborne game is the best or what happened when the three met in a
Grand Theft Auto Online lobby.

Chat2024 at least aims to be helpful rather than hilarious so we decided to put some critical questions to the front-runners, Biden and Trump.

Is breakfast an important meal or is that a conspiracy propagated by Big Cereal?

Who would win in a cage fight: Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk?

And a possible election-decider here: has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

On second thought, maybe don't let an AI help you decide the fate of your country. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2023/09/12/chat2024/