Can we regulate reality? AI, sovereignty and the battle over what counts as real

As Europe debates AI regulation and digital sovereignty, the deeper question may be less about chips and data centres and more about perception itself. If platforms shape what we see as real, then regulating technology is also about regulating reality, writes Alan Lawson

There’s a much-discussed photo of Indian PM Narendra Modi on stage at the recent AI Impact Summit. It drew attention because OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, CEO and founder of Anthropic, were the only two not holding hands. 

We’re used to these choreographed displays of unity, so there was something faintly comic about two tech billionaires refusing to shake hands in public. When I was at school, children who fell out were often tied together with a shoelace for the day. Medieval, perhaps, but it usually worked. 

It was a rare light moment in a debate that is anything but light. 

Daily predictions of mass job losses, autonomous weapons and runaway systems keep AI in a permanent state of alarm. Now “sovereignty” has entered the conversation, filling conference halls and policy papers across Europe. Regulation, data flows and dependence on foreign infrastructure are suddenly urgent topics. 

Some argue Europe is late to the AI party. NVIDIA now has a market capitalisation roughly equivalent to Germany’s GDP. That is just one of the so-called “Magnificent Seven”. Still, Europe’s strength has always been reflection. With French President Emmanuel Macron taking an increasingly vocal stance on AI policy, it is worth recalling the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. 

At the summit, Modi insisted that there must be “established levels of authenticity for content within the digital world… people must know what is authentic, and what has been generated by AI”. 

The ambition is understandable. The difficulty is that authenticity has been under strain for decades. 

In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard argued that modern societies increasingly operate through simulations, representations that no longer point back to a stable reality but instead refer to other representations. He famously suggested that the map can precede the territory. 

Consider something simple: social media video. I recently posted underwater footage from a diving trip. It was green, grainy and dull. A friend asked why I would share such “lousy” footage. 

Yet the recording matched my memory. At 30 metres, the underwater world does look green and muted. Colour is not a fixed property of objects; it depends on reflected light. As depth increases, light penetration decreases. Longer wavelengths such as red are absorbed quickly, disappearing within the first 10 metres. Unless you use artificial lighting, underwater footage will look subdued. 

Today, however, colour correction tools can ‘improve’ such footage instantly. The result appears vivid and cinematic. It aligns with the collective expectation of what underwater scenes should look like. The corrected version becomes the standard, even if it departs from lived experience. 

In this way, representation quietly reshapes perception. The version that feels authentic is often the one most heavily processed. Over time, the simulated image becomes the reference point for reality. The map precedes the territory. 

This matters when policymakers talk about “establishing authenticity”. If our shared sense of the real has already shifted, regulation becomes more complex. Spend time on any social media platform and you quickly see that authenticity itself has become a genre that is stylised, curated and optimised. 

Here is where Europe’s sovereignty debate takes on a deeper dimension. The European Union’s Digital Services Act and its AI Act are often framed in terms of jurisdiction and economic independence. Those concerns are legitimate. But platforms do more than host content; they curate it. 

If platforms influence what surfaces, what trends and what disappears, then they shape the conditions under which reality is encountered. Regulation therefore touches not only markets and competition, but perception. 

Macron has argued that Europe’s goal is to design its own solutions, preserve sovereignty and avoid dependency. That ambition is usually interpreted in economic terms: data centres, semiconductor supply chains, infrastructure. There is also a cultural question. Who designs the systems that filter and frame collective experience? 

When the mechanisms mediating public life drift too far from lived experience, sovereignty risks becoming an exercise in managing appearances. Alongside questions of innovation and competitiveness, the AI debate concerns how societies maintain a workable sense of what is real. 

So here’s an idea, perhaps Sam Altman and Dario Amodei should be tied together with a shoelace for a day, and maybe Macron too, and Modi, and perhaps some white-collared workers soon to be unemployed, and maybe we could all go diving together, and agree or not on the ‘established levels of authenticity’. 

Alan Lawson is an award-winning artist, writer and climber of Scottish–Spanish descent, with paintings held in public collections including the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. A graduate of the Florence Academy of Art and co-founder of The Alpine Fellowship, his writing has appeared in journals such as Studies in Photography, American Arts Quarterly and Bare Hands Poetry Magazine, and he was shortlisted for the 2014 Bridport Poetry Prize. His debut novel The Birdwatchers will be published by Foreshore Books in March 

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