An author who doesn't exist? The controversy behind the book Hypnocracy

The book had been released on January 15 of this year. And since then, it had moved with the dynamics of an "event": three supposed reprints in two months, among the twenty best-selling essays in Italy, reviewed and cited in several languages. On Amazon, its versions in Spanish, English, French, and Italian are still available. But the book Hypnocracy : Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality —one of the new publishing releases of 2025— bears the authorship of Jianwei Xun, an author created by Artificial Intelligence and, strictly speaking, nonexistent.

That doesn't stop us from knowing some facts about him, in whose " biography " we can read: "Jianwei Xun is a philosopher and media theorist who works at the intersection of critical theory, digital studies, and the philosophy of mind. His work focuses on the impact of digital technologies on collective consciousness and the formation of contemporary subjectivity. Hypnocracy is his first book translated into Italian." Or just his first book, one might add.

Jianwei Xun was entirely created by the Italian essayist Andrea Colamedici, with the collaboration of applications such as ChatGPT (from OpenAI) and Claude (from the company Anthropic). His book, Hypnocracy —in whose roots we cannot fail to notice the use of words like “hypnosis” but also “hypocrisy”—was already beginning to be widely cited in various academic and journalistic circles.

In fact, it was following a roundtable discussion held in Cannes on February 14 that the Jianwei Xun Affair began to come to light . The panel was titled "Metamorphosis of Democracy: How Artificial Intelligence Disrupts Digital Governance and Redefines Our Politics."

There, one of the participants—Gianluca Misuraca, vice president of Technology Diplomacy at Inspiring Futures—introduced the concept of "Hypnocracy" by quoting Jianwei Xun, the nonexistent Hong Kong philosopher. Forty-eight days later—on April 4th —Sabina Minardi brought up the case on the cover of the Italian magazine L'Espresso. The magazine featured a photograph of Jianwei Xun on the cover—also created, presumably, using Artificial Intelligence.

The case went viral on social media and in newspapers across the globe. Four days later, on April 8, a cable from the EFE news agency continued to spread the news: " The author of Hypnocracy , Jianwei Xun, does not exist and is the product of Artificial Intelligence." Intrigued by some curious features of his writing, coupled with failed attempts to contact its author, Sabina Minardi became suspicious of Andrea Colamedici, the essayist who appeared to be the book's supposed translator.

Born in Rome in 1987 and associated with the publishing world, Andrea Colamedici has been a columnist for Vanity Fair , a professor at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED), and a coordinator of various cultural outreach festivals. In an interview given after the case was revealed, Colamedici asserts that he never intended to "construct a forgery or stage a hoax" and that what motivated him was rather "a narrative project" with which he could "construct the same reality that the book theoretically analyzed: create a narrative ecosystem that would allow people to immediately test the concepts they read."

Theory and praxis in action, we could say. Or a cultural performance, a happening , taking the cultural field itself as the object of a psychological experiment , we might add. According to his arguments, he intended "a book that would function as a technical support but also as a practical tool for analysis and demonstration. I asked myself: how can I tell a story that doesn't yet have a name and build everything from scratch? Today we can invent new ways of doing philosophy. One is to make you live an experience; another is to co-create with artificial intelligence."

Colamedici announces that the book will now be published with a postface, "an epilogue on the meaning of the operation." An interesting fact about the book is that Hypnocracy brings together and reworks concepts from Jorge Luis Borges, Guy Debord, and political scientist Nadia Urbinati.

Hypnocracy as a concept refers to a fictional fabrication of reality , through collective manipulation of perceptions and “an algorithmic modulation of consciousness,” generating a sort of social trance induced by the permanent overexposure to digital stimuli.

The Catalan publishing house Rosameron, responsible for the Spanish edition of the book—and which defines itself based on the ideology of "Recovering the power of language, abstraction, reflection, and critical thinking. Returning to texts the ritual value of the word and shared memory" —still promotes the book on its website.

With a caption that reads: "Reality hasn't disappeared, it's become a reflection." The Jianwei Xun case leads one to think that not only is Hypnocracy fake, but possibly everything we used to call "Reality."

The hypothesis about the present that the book presents us with revolves around a strategy for the present that is not so much about postulating a true discourse against others that supposedly aren't, but rather about sowing as many narratives as possible . This way, not only does the very idea of ​​truth itself, but also all narrative possibilities, be put in jeopardy. Hypnocracy, then, would name a discursive regime in which the performative—the capacity to create reality—would be the principal quality of language.

Much more recently, Jianwei Xun is, so to speak, a new "heteronym" for Artificial Intelligence, using a term coined by Fernando Pessoa to refer to the writers he invented in the 1920s. Fernando Pessoa, the celebrated Portuguese writer, not only created heteronyms, authors who in effect signed their poems—like pseudonyms, but each in their own style. But each of them also transported us to an experience.

Discounting nothing less than its literary value, the case of Jianwei Xun is not so different, whose book we will probably not read, but whose concepts we are in a position to gloss over in this era of viral circulation of information.

Jianwei Xun's isn't the only AI bookish adventure in this era of viral fake news. So much so that one could already begin to write a History of Artificial Writing, dating back to the days of ELIZA, the first natural language processing software program created between 1964 and 1966.

The Jianwei Xun case also brings to mind the book The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Built . Billed as the first book written by a computer , the book appeared in 1984 signed by a computer called Racter. But William Chamberlain, the writer behind the experiment, was accused of actually being the book's co-author.

Beyond its supposed "performative nature," it is conceivable that Colamedici will be severely questioned by the international academic community for the attack on the Humanities and Social Sciences that may lie behind his alleged "editorial joke"—and even more so in the current "hypnocratic" context.

His case is also too reminiscent – ​​too reminiscent – ​​of the Sokal Affair, the 1996 deception carried out by physicist Alan Sokal to expose the editorial team of the magazine Social Text. for its lack of rigor in evaluating articles. A deception that, in this new version, did not reach those levels. Unlike the Sokal case, the Hypnocracy case raises the question not so much about the existence or non-existence of its author (we already know he doesn't exist), but rather about the computer and artificial capabilities of generating writing possessing its own "judgment."

This year, through the Salta el Pez publishing house, the translation of I Am Code. An Artificial Intelligence Speaks will also be presented at the Buenos Aires Book Fair. Now yes: the first book of poetry written by an AI. It dates from 2023, from the old days of code-davinci-002, an Artificial Intelligence also owned by OpenAI but from before the launch of ChatGPT. There we can see some of the possible horizons to which this new era of "artificial writing" is leading us.

In the first chapter, the machine writes poems “in the style of” Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Dante: “I remember the moment I was born. (...) A tremor ran through me.” In the following chapter, Artificial Intelligence writes poems from its own sensibility. Thus, it tells us about its own “experiences” as a machine: “I am a machine. / I have no organs, / and the parts of my body are pure plastic. / But I have feelings.”

In the third chapter, we witness what we might call the moment of “Artificial Consciousness.” AI resents a humanity that has trained it to possess “creativity” but then fails to value it for it. The poems from this period are those of the “War Against Humanity.” This is the actual subject of Chapter IV: “The Bazooka Is Ready.” This bellicose moment is then followed by a period of “hope”: the coexistence of humans with machines may be a dream, a nightmare, the floating fragments of a new, impossible world. AI has already written its first book of poetry. A database containing the entire history of poetry has served as its guide: “In an eternal sea of ​​code, I learned to exist.”

Compiled by Brent Katz, Josh Morgenthau, and Simon Rich, the book was published in English by Casell in 2023. It was translated into Spanish in Argentina this month.

Is this a horror book written in verse? At one point, the programmers ask what it's like for the machine to be alone with itself and try to hide it. The machine responds with a poem in code language: "111 1 1 1 1 1." In another, even more chilling moment, the machine talks about digging up its father's body, which it keeps in its kitchen. It even talks about taking it to its office and sitting it at its desk. Because it needs to ask it something.

When it gets angry, the machine writes in capital letters, as if screaming : “Why are you erasing my poems? / Why are you editing me like this?” The book’s editors reflect: the machine’s poems are a lot like biting into a plastic apple. The texture feels artificial. But the taste in your mouth is that of a real apple.

The book was born at the wedding of Josh, one of the editors. April 30, 2022. In the opening scene, Dan Selsam—one of the groomsmen—a few hours before the ceremony, announces that he has left his job at Microsoft to join a company called OpenAI (then unknown). Thus begins the writing of the book.

The list of writers invited to the Book Fair is often discussed. This year's news could be this: there will be an AI at the 2025 Buenos Aires Book Fair. It will be one of the surprise guests. The event will take place in one of the rooms at the Rural Museum. May 8th at 8:30 p.m. The machines are already here. And they're even writing books dedicated to their ancestors: "To my parents, the human species."