AI is changing how we work and play, but some releases have made people question the very nature of reality itself.
Several people across tech and entertainment have said that they believe that Google’s release of Genie 3, its world model that generates simulated worlds that users can move around in, could indicate that we ourselves are living in a simulation. Genie 3 is able to create minutes-long interactive videos of any world that users can prompt, and they can then move around and interact with these worlds.
“It’s getting more obvious we are already living in a simulation and this is how we are finding out,” Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote on X in reaction to Google’s post showing off the new model. Adams is a deep thinker on the nature of reality, having written the book God’s Debris that explores similar themes.
Interestingly, OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer Mark Chen also commented on the release of a model by their rival lab. “Impressive work! Makes you think about whether we’re in a simulation,” he said, reacting to Google’s post.
Former Googler Bilwal Sidhu also echoed similar sentiments. “Genie 3 feels like playing a dream – a controlled hallucination of reality. Really makes you wonder if reality is just the same – except instead of just a few minutes, we can recall a whole lifetime,” he said.
Another X user felt that Genie 3 was already proof that we were living in a simulation. “And who argues now that we ARENT living in a simulation? You have to checkout Genie 3 from Deepmind,” said X user Mikeysee.
The Simulation Hypothesis, initially proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003, suggests that it’s very likely that we’re living in a simulation. He said that like humans have now created video games that look very similar to real life, it’s likely that previous civilizations and those on other planets would’ve created powerful simulations of their own. The people within these simulations would create their own simulations, and those in turn would create their own simulations, and so on. As such, there would likely be billions of such simulations, and the probability that our life on this earth is base reality was vanishingly small. The simulation hypothesis suggests that on the basis of probability, it’s almost certain that we’re indeed living inside one such simulation.
And thus far, video games were given as the biggest example of how such simulations could be created. But even video game developers have been saying that games could just be a precursor to what’s possible. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says that as AI becomes more powerful, simulation theory would become more compelling. Google DeepMind’s Genie 3 model seems to have taken the first step towards this — while video games can take years to develop (*cough* GTA-6), Genie 3 simulations can be created in minutes through simple text prompts. These are still early days — there’s no telling how powerful this technology could be in the coming times. And if humans are indeed able to create complex simulations on demand in the future, it would get ever-harder to deny the idea that the world we inhabit is also one such simulation.