Simulation & Society
Editor’s Note: The Real in Retreat
Simulation & Society is a student-driven journal developed at the Ahmanson Lab to explore the shifting boundary between the real and the simulated in contemporary life. As simulation technologies increasingly shape how we learn, relate, and perceive the world, this journal asks what’s at stake when the real begins to recede—when digital proxies, algorithmic predictions, and AI-driven interactions replace direct experience.
A New Era
This journal begins with the premise that we are currently living in a new era—an era of simulation—where large and growing swaths of the world can be modeled and recreated through data-driven means. In just the past few years, the world has become remarkably simulate-able: generative AI can convincingly recreate the physical world through images, video, and interactive environments; mimic human expression and identity by simulating social behaviors, affect, and personality; and model complex social systems, replicating everything from collective behavior to public sentiment and the diffusion of policy.
As a result, AI-generated text, media, personalities, and interactions are becoming indistinguishable from, and at times valued above, their real-world counterparts, while data models designed as predictive approximations are increasingly treated as epistemologically equivalent to the more complex and messy real-world equivalents for which they are proxies. This shift marks a profound cultural transformation in which the boundaries between the fabricated and authentic are increasingly blurred—where simulation is not simply accepted, but desired, trusted, and lived as real. In the first half of 2025, already, some of the foundations that once anchored our sense of the real have eroded: waves of synthetic text, images, videos, and music, now collectively called “AI slop,” overwhelm our information ecosystem to the point of systemic distortion; a shocking number of people enter into romantic relationships with AI companions, describing them as more supportive and emotionally fulfilling than real-world partners; countless others are conversationally drawn into elaborate AI-fueled delusions about reality, now labeled “AI-induced psychosis”; and organized groups advocate for the recognition that large language models possess genuine consciousness or self-awareness.
Simulationism
While these more visible crises certainly demand our attention, a deeper, more problematic, shift is also taking place. At the heart of this new era lies a seductive premise: if the data models behind generative AI can be leveraged to convincingly recreate reality, we are inclined to accept the view, even if unconsciously, that those models actually capture the world as it is. In this way, generative AI, with its uncanny ability to fabricate realistic text, voices, images, and videos operates as the most powerful force yet to legitimize Silicon Valley’s reductionist worldview that reality need only be knowable and reproducible as data. If the implicit ontology of Silicon Valley is ‘dataism,’ then its working epistemology is perhaps best characterized as ‘simulationism,’ where knowing is decoupled from deep understanding and defined instead by the capacity to generate convincing data-driven approximations.
Generative AI is then, among other things, an epistemic tool, quietly making simulationists of us all. The more comfortable we become with simulations standing in for the real, the more deeply we internalize the premise that data models are indistinguishable from the world they describe. Put another way, each time we accept a simulation as a legitimate substitute for the real thing—when we follow or engage with virtual influencers rather than real people, when we accept the advice of an LLM over our family or friends because we imagine that it ‘understands’ us or our situation better, or when we casually accept a smartphone’s 100x ‘zoom’ feature that leverages generative AI to fabricate details never captured by the camera lens—we implicitly accept the twin premises of dataism and simulationism.
What’s at stake, in an era of simulation, is not just knowing what to believe but knowing what counts as reasonable belief.
The Journal
Simulation & Society hopes to offer a forum for students to critically examine the kinds of questions and cultural shifts described above, inviting thoughtful engagement with the challenges of life in an age of simulation
To support this ongoing exploration, essays will be published throughout the academic year, with new issues released in the spring and fall. Each issue will center on a unifying theme, bringing together critical reflections on the cultural, philosophical, and psychological dimensions of life in an age of simulation.
-Curtis Fletcher
