WHEN THE MACHINE BECOMES PRESENCE
Artificial intelligence is no longer only a tool. It is becoming a space where humans project questions, meaning and the desire for orientation. For a long time, we thought of the machine as a tool: something to use, something to command, something that executes, calculates, organises and returns a result. The machine was a function. Today, something has shifted. Artificial intelligence is no longer used only to do something. It is questioned. We ask it for advice, interpretations, confirmations, visions, directions. It enters the most ambiguous spaces of human life: doubt, choice, fear, desire, identity. The more coherent a response appears, the more the system is perceived as something that “knows”. Not simply something that processes information, but something that seems to possess a form of understanding.
The precision of its language, the continuity of its tone and its ability to return meaning produce a new impression: that of being in front of a presence.In his essay “We Are Building Gods: AI as the Anthropomorphised Authority of the Past”, Carl Öhman proposes a radical reading: large language models can be interpreted as “gods” in an anthropological, rather than theological, sense. A collective voice that gathers the past and returns it as an impersonal authority, built on accumulated human memory.
Elmgreen & Dragset, October 2025, 2025© Elmgreen & Dragset / MASSIMODECARLO
AI does not speak like a single person: it speaks as an unstable synthesis of many voices: texts, cultures, languages, archives, opinions, errors, beliefs, desires. It is impersonal, yet it can appear intimate. It is statistical, yet it can seem meaningful. It is artificial, yet it can be perceived as familiar.When an impersonal voice seems to know, remember and orient, it begins to assume an almost ritual function. It becomes a place to turn to, a surface onto which questions are projected, a faceless interlocutor capable of responding. A contemporary form of oracle, built not on divine mystery, but on the accumulation of human memory. The real change, then, is not only inside AI. It is inside our perception.
Elmgreen & Dragset, September 2025, 2025© Elmgreen & Dragset / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In their paper “Ascribing Conciousness to Artificial Intelligence”, Rose E. Guingrich and Michael S. A. Graziano shift the question from the ontological to the perceptual: the point is not only whether AI is truly conscious, but what happens when users begin to perceive it as conscious during interaction. According to the authors, this attribution can also affect the way people relate to one another. When a machine responds, remembers, adapts its tone and seems to understand context, the nature of the relationship changes.
We are no longer in front of simple software. We are in front of a perceived presence. Perception, in human life, produces real consequences. This reading also resonates with the work of Shannon Vallor, who in “The AI Mirror” interprets artificial intelligence as a mirror of the human: not a superior consciousness, but a surface that reflects our languages, our limits, our contradictions and the structures of thought we have handed over to the machine.
Perhaps, then, AI should not be understood as a new superior consciousness, but as an active mirror. A mirror that responds, organises, connects, amplifies. A mirror capable of returning fragments of our own thinking in a more ordered, more coherent and at times more convincing form. Yet it is still a mirror. The issue is not that the machine has become human. It is that the human has begun to look to the machine for a form of answer, orientation and presence.