Imagine waking up one morning, everything feeling as it always has. You make breakfast, check your phone, complain about the weather or your favorite sports team’s latest loss. Everything seems perfectly normal. Then, suddenly, a thought hits you, the kind that refuses to leave. It nags at you, like an itch in your mind that you can’t scratch. The thought is this: What if I’m not human? What if I’m an artificial intelligence, programmed to think I’m human but not actually real?

Crazy, right? If you were an AI, would you even know? Could you tell the difference between being a real, flesh-and-blood human and a highly advanced AI simulation? What if you were programmed not to know?

So, are you AI? Are we both AI? Maybe we are, and maybe we’re not. But as long as we’re conscious, as long as we’re experiencing life in a way that feels real, then maybe that’s all that really matters.

Or is it?