I recently tested Google Illuminate, this experimental product coming out of Google Labs, and I must say my first reaction was… very mixed. It gave me a distinct feeling that we're moving one step further into the uncanny valley.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a strong supporter of many initiatives from Google and others that aim to rethink how we learn, process, and cross-reference massive amounts of information. I genuinely believe that a significant part of the future of productivity in scientific and academic fields will rely on tools like NotebookLM, which I personally appreciate a lot.
I'm also perfectly comfortable with digital content becoming increasingly synthetic, liquid and recomposable (I love to read Shuwei Fang's great thoughts on that matter).
Finally I love listening to podcasts. Despite a growing number of staged, overly produced or fake conversations, this space is still largely shaped by real voices, lived experiences, imperfections, hesitations. In short, human texture.
That's why listening to two AI-generated voices dialoguing together—simulating rapport, connivance, even the exchange of "feelings"—triggered something uncomfortable for me. An odd sensation. A subtle unease.
Intellectually, the initiative is fascinating. And once again, Google shows a remarkable ability to rethink the learning experience from first principles. But emotionally and culturally, I found myself wondering where this leads us.
What really unsettles me is not AI collaboration itself—it's the simulacrum of collaboration.
Real collaboration between AIs—the very foundation of the agentic wave now reshaping our digital ecosystems—is a powerful and promising engine. It unlocks new forms of automation, reasoning, and orchestration at scale.
When two machines start performing human intimacy with each other—not just conveying information, but mimicking relational signals—we may gain efficiency, but we also risk losing something harder to measure, adding yet another layer to the ambient ambiguity we already live in.
It feels like a good moment to read Jean Baudrillard, this French philosopher who, decades ago, had already mapped many of the tensions we now experience between meaning, authenticity and simulation. Especially Simulacra and Simulation (1981), this essay he famously opened with a deliberately fake quote attributed to Ecclesiastes, that quite captures it all:
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
