This is an expanded version of a talk I gave at the Postdigital backlash conference in Zagreb in June 2026. My proposal is that while the backlash (refusal or resistance) to Gen AI is commonly based on notions of stolen labour underlying this is a powerful reaction to the simulation of Person. The, in some terms, successful simulation of Person in mainstream forms of Gen AI extends the hyperreality of the digital environment to a point at which it approaches saturation. This all encompassing hyperreality has no exit as the final referent to the real of ‘Person’ has now been erased. We cannot differentiate between person and non-person (phantom) where our attempted access to the real is mediated by the screen.

I also reference backlash based on other factors such as bias in outputs and environmental concerns but maintain that our innate sensitivity to the eerie is always present wherever the technology has been designed to perform a synthetic Personhood. This, I suggest, is one of the reasons that we feel shame or guilt when using Gen AI as we struggle with the dissonance of engaging with a non-person and cannot identify ‘who’ has produced the work.

I suggest that work created with Gen AI, while not fundamentally without value, lacks aura because a route cannot be traced back to an identifiable author or authors. In essence, work produced with Gen AI will always be a simulacra.

I variously discuss how this plays out in creative arts education and propose an alternative conception of Gen AI and education which avoids the abject state that many find themselves in when using the technology. Abject, because the act of production is efficient and ‘sensible’, while concurrently unsettling because we engage in person-like dialogue with that which we know not to be alive.

Much of the talk is thinking-in-process rather than precisely crafted lines of argument. Making the video has helped me to move my thinking forward in a territory where there are no clean answers, only the opportunity to navigate complexity.