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Echoes Without Presence: AI, Michael Jackson, and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity

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Abstract

This essay investigates how artificial intelligence reshapes the legacy of Michael Jackson by analysing the growing proliferation of AI-generated simulations, deepfake vocals, reconstructed short films, and algorithmic “enhancements” through an interdisciplinary lens that combines postmodern semiotics, neuroscience, narratology, and embodied artistic practice. Although Jackson’s creative process was rooted in intuition, bodily intelligence, and whole-brain integration, contemporary AI systems operate through disembodied information processing that collapses context, narrative, and meaning. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, the essay argues that AI-generated representations transform Jackson into a hyperreal copy detached from the lived practice and historical specificity that shaped his art. Iain McGilchrist’s hemispheric model offers a neurological explanation for why AI cannot access the intuitive, right-hemispheric dimensions of creativity that underpinned Jackson’s mastery. Mieke Bal’s work on narratology and cultural memory further reveals how the decontextualised fragments produced by AI risk erasing the narrative, artistic, and ethical layers embedded in Jackson’s oeuvre, reducing it to spectacle rather than preserving its significance.

Integrating these perspectives with the author’s lived experience as an artist, the essay contends that AI threatens to estrange future generations from the embodied truth at the heart of Jackson’s artistry. Yet it also identifies a constructive role for AI: one focused on ethical preservation rather than imitation, such as archival restoration, annotation, and deepfake detection. Ultimately, the essay argues that safeguarding Jackson’s legacy requires resisting technological resurrection and prioritising the sacred, historically grounded dimensions of artistic presence.

Keywords: Michael Jackson; artificial intelligence; simulacra; hyperreality; creativity; embodiment; cultural memory; narratology; deepfakes; legacy preservation.

Essay by Karin Merx, BMus, MA Art History, BA Cultural Philosophy, Classically trained Artist, editor of The Journal of Michael Jackson Academic Studies, and author of  A festive parade of highlights. La Grande Parade as evaluation of the museum policy of Edy De Wilde at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam published with academic publisher Eburon.

REFERENCE AS:

Merx, Karin, ‘Echoes Without Presence: AI, Michael Jackson, and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity’, 12, no.2 (2025), The Journal of Michael Jackson Academic Studies (https://michaeljacksonstudies.org/echoes-without-presence-ai-michael-jackson-and-the-crisis of-cultural-authenticity

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Echoes Without Presence: AI, Michael Jackson, and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity by Karin Merx

Introduction

In the age of AI, Michael Jackson’s image and voice can now be digitally resurrected (a trajectory that traces back to the 2014 hologram performance), but at what cost to his art?1 In 2022, AI, also known as artificial intelligence or, more accurately, Artificial Information Processing, was introduced to the public. Not that AI never existed; it has already existed for decades. AI is becoming increasingly a part of our daily lives. Multiple tools have been developed, and machine training has been conducted through various means, including crawling websites and extracting billions of artworks without consent, as well as the influence of what we, as consumers, consciously and unconsciously put into it. AI lives on our devices, and with every update, it increasingly invades our phones and computer systems; and, by extension, our lives.2

The art of Michael Jackson, his music, his short films, his dance and his presence have already caught the eye of many fans, who started to use his deep fake voice in their music or alter his short films to either ‘re-imagine Michael Jackson’, or ‘enhance’ the short films like Earth Song into 3D using AI.

After his passing, previously unpublished works were released, including the Michael album, which contained alleged fake tracks.3 His family and the community of fans condemned this.4 Today, with AI at our fingertips, available in almost every digital application, we see more fake content than ever. Fans also use it to tamper with the art of their heroes, infringing on their copyright and intellectual property, as if they were the only ones allowed to do so. It is as if they feel they own him, and his work, and even his art doesn’t seem good enough for today’s wishes, so it gets the AI treatment, meaning people alter his work and his persona using AI.

This essay examines the implications of AI-generated simulations on the legacy of Michael Jackson through the intersecting lenses of Jean Baudrillard, Iain McGilchrist, Mieke Bal, and my own perspective as a classically trained artist, musician, cultural philosopher, and art historian. I bring these voices together because Bal and McGilchrist share a humanistic impulse to restore meaning, while Baudrillard offers a tragic, almost prophetic vision of its loss. All three, each from a distinct standpoint, share a deep concern for how perception and representation shape the real.

I take part in this discussion because I live through and experience it at the time it is happening. I can because I can’t take enough distance, and I am part of the current situation and current culture. The convergence of postmodern semiotics, neurological phenomenology, cultural narratology, cultural memory, and embodied artistic practice reveals a shared concern: that AI threatens not just to reproduce, but to displace the very essence of art, in particular that of Michael Jackson, as a living, historical, and ethical encounter. 

The main question I will address is: To what extent will the use of AI estrange us and future generations from Michael Jackson’s art, and in what ways could AI be used to preserve his legacy without compromising its authenticity? To understand what is at stake when AI interferes with art, we must first return to the source of creation itself. This embodied process made Michael Jackson’s artistry so extraordinary. Before AI could simulate him, there was a living practice that united body, soul, and imagination.

Dream It, Believe It, Visualise It, Make It Happen

Using artificial intelligence to “enhance” or recreate Michael Jackson’s iconic short films, utilising his deep fake voice and performances, has ignited a wave of fascination and deep concern. What does it mean to simulate an artist whose work was so tied to the body (his voice and dance), to performance, and to cultural context? This question is not merely technical or aesthetic; it is philosophical, ethical, and historical. I will frame a multi-layered critique of AI’s impact on cultural authenticity. Before I go into that, let’s explore how Michael Jackson created his art.

The story goes that when asked how Jackson wrote his songs or got his ideas, he said that it came from above.  Jackson called it divine inspiration, given by God. He often referred to receiving the complete song with lyrics and chords all put right into his head. While playing, deeply relaxed amid a water-balloon fight, he had to quickly go inside to record the song that would become Speechless. 5

Apart from that, Jackson wrote in his autobiography Moonwalk: ‘I’ve always joked that I didn’t ask to sing and dance, but it’s true. When I open my mouth, music comes out. I’m honoured to have this ability. I thank God for it every day. I try to cultivate what He gave me. I feel I’m compelled to do what I do.’ 6  Michael Jackson possessed immense talent, but he also worked relentlessly to refine it. His voice, dance, and the totality of his art were the products of years of disciplined mastery.

The skills he mastered and honed required time, care, love, resilience, and repetition until they became second nature to him. Hence, the word mastering. He lived what he preached: ‘Learn from the greatest and become greater,’ a notion as old as art, from mimesis to emulation, the latter described by Aristoteles as an emotion characterised by a sense of inadequacy when one observes someone who possesses the skills needed and is highly valued. This ‘emotion’, then, will motivate you to get better. In that respect, it is an excellent tool for learning.

Jackson had an exceptional talent; nevertheless, he continued to refine his voice, dance, and all aspects of the arts, becoming one of the best and most versatile artists in popular music.  In her research, Carol Dweck found that individuals who were labelled as child prodigies were not necessarily better off than those who had to work for their achievements. 7 Michael Jackson was the exception; he was a child prodigy who worked extremely hard to grow, setting the bar higher and higher.

To better understand why AI cannot replicate this process, we examine the neurological and philosophical aspects of creativity. Dr Iain McGilchrist’s hemispheric model of the brain provides a crucial lens through which to view the contrast between intuition and embodiment, and the mechanistic logic of artificial information processing.

Nowadays, skills are not at the forefront of learning; in fact, according to Dr Iain McGilchrist, ‘Skills have been de-emphasised in art, as elsewhere in the culture […]. We’ve all got to be as creative as one another: to accept that some people will always be exceptional is uncomfortable for us. Instead of seeing great art as an indication of what humanity can achieve, it comes to be seen as an expression of what another being, a potential competitor, has achieved.’ 8

It is mastering the skill that makes the artist. As a musician, I know what it means to master an instrument. On stage, it can look easy, but the hard work behind it is what gives this sense of simplicity. Visual artists began as apprentices, grinding pigments, learning to observe, and drawing and painting from life, creating stories on canvas. As a visual artist, I can say the same, learning to observe, learning about dark, light and shadows, learning about colour, and it never stops. 

McGilchrist writes in The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the Western World that you can’t make the creative act happen. Of course, you need to do something, but it will never happen while you are doing it. He writes: “Attention is a creative act, and creation is really about the induction of a highly attentive state.” 9 According to McGilchrist, there are three phases of creativity. The first is the preparation phase, which is partly conscious and partially unconscious, partly willed and partly serendipitous. The development of skills and the acquisition of knowledge characterise this phase. The second phase is the incubation, which is unconscious; it takes introspection, seeding and letting it grow.

When a bass-line came to him, Jackson let it go, later receiving the whole song, which McGilchrist would call the third phase of illumination. It is at that stage when Jackson receives what he planted, as the flowers that came out of the unconscious quit suddenly. This happens not at will; this is what mainly the right hemisphere does, or as McGilchrist writes, “such moments are robustly associated with the activity in the right amygdala and right superior temporal sulcus.” 10 The last phase is quality control, a very conscious and deliberate role, associated with the left hemisphere. 

It was well-known that Jackson was at the forefront of the quality he brought to the world. This entire process is what we refer to as whole-brain functioning. You can’t make a creative act happen; you have to listen and be receptive without having anything clear to hear yet, or see yet when creating visuals. You can’t close down what it is precisely, because then you lose it. Creativity involves remaining open while receiving something that, in the end, is quite specific. Creativity, therefore, is highly right-hemisphere dependent. 11

When interviewers then asked Jackson how he wrote his songs, he couldn’t explain it; it wasn’t a formula, nor was it a matter of deep thinking. It was the silence, or the playing, the receiving, the ability to let go if it wasn’t clear, to receive the insights, and then it came to him as the lightbulb moment. This highly intuitive process can’t be done with AI. The explanation again comes from Dr McGilchrist. In his keynote in 2022 on an AI conference, he said: “AI (artificial information-processing), by the way, not artificial intelligence, could in many ways be seen as replicating the functions of the left hemisphere at frightening speed across the entire globe. The left hemisphere manipulates tokens or symbols for aspects of experience. The right hemisphere is in touch with experience itself, with the body and deeper emotions, with context and the vast realm of the implicit. AI, like the left hemisphere, has no sense of the bigger picture, of other values, or of the way in which context, or even scale and extent, changes everything.” 12

AI serves many because we live in a world where we want (and are forced to) instant gratification. The Internet, particularly social media, plays a significant role in this process. In his paper ‘The Shrinking Sense Of Self: How Hyperreality And Instant Gratification Redefine Identity’, Mr Suhas Bondre argues that: ‘the relentless pressures of consumerism and technological innovation have precipitated a crisis of meaning, fragmenting identity and eroding deep social bonds.’ 13 It was the philosopher Baudrillard who wrote about hyperreality and simulacra in the 80ties of the last century. Having understood the embodied nature of MJ’s mastery, we now examine what happens when AI attempts to replicate it.

 The imagination that fuels artistic creation is rooted in the body and the unseen, the right hemisphere’s capacity to perceive wholes rather than fragments. Simulation, by contrast, is a disembodied echo of this process. Where imagination gives birth to meaning, simulation merely mirrors appearance.

Imagination versus Simulation

What is imagination, and in what ways can we define it? The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as the ability to form mental images or the capacity to generate new ideas. From my perspective as an artist, imagination is closely tied to what I see in my mind’s eye, visualise, and symbolise to create my art. It is the narrative of how I see the object I paint and the stories I tell to reflect on our culture. The world we see was once in someone’s imagination. 

Jean Baudrillard foresaw this inversion decades ago. His theory of simulacra and hyperreality speaks directly to what we witness today in AI-generated art, a proliferation of surfaces that replace experience itself. Philosopher Baudrillard, in his book Simulacra and Simulation, argues that simulation has overtaken the space of imagination. In this respect, simulation is the death of imagination because, according to Baudrillard, it is a copy with no original. It means that AI-generated work and 3D recreations of, in this case, Michael Jackson’s short films are not imaginative reinterpretations, but simulations that create a gap between the work and its meaning. 14

According to Baudrillard, “simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real, ’ and the ‘imaginary.” In our world today, which is over-saturated with media, representations begin to substitute for reality itself. Baudrillard argues that postmodern culture replaces reality with signs and symbols, creating a hyperreal space in which the distinction between the artificial and the real collapses. Baudrillard was unable to experience how the world has already become a simulacrum of our own making, thanks to AI. For him, it was the media and the way Disney created a literal Disney World (a simulacrum, not real) that made you lose connection with reality.  We live through the media; we live with mobile phones in our hands, and they have become an extension of our bodies. 

Image older MJ with beard, Part of the project “As If Nothing Happened” by Alper Yesiltas (MJDLO: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/michael-jacksons-dream-lives-on-an-academic-conversation/id1076092754?l=en-GB&i=1000586931630 )

AI images of Jackson and fragments of his short films are everywhere. AI is not creative; those using it are not artists. AI brings fragmented pieces together through the algorithm. In their paper ‘The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Musicians’ by Mark Fox et al., they discuss the machines that are already producing lyrics and generating music. However, “Lyricists and composers have used emotion in their music to elicit feelings, bring tears, share experiences, and trigger specific memories in their listeners.“16 When people use the deep fake voice of Jackson to ‘reimagine’ his music, they do precisely the opposite. Even though Baudrillard primarily discusses images, which I will explore later, the use of deepfake voices is a simulacrum, a copy without authenticity; there is no ‘real’ Jackson. The consequence of that will eventually be that people become implicit in this illusion.

The same goes for the immense hunger to see better pixels of his short films, rather than being respectful of the innovative and pioneering work Jackson has done. This is currently leading fans to tamper with his short films, for instance, creating a 3D copy of “Earth Song.” Baudrillard argues that: ‘To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence.’ 17 Jackson’s short films emphasised a deep meaning, a message. He was known for his perfection, and according to Baudrillard, that technical perfection is part of meaning and an effect of art. It is then not hyperrealistic. 18 If you do not understand that, you have totally missed the point of what Jackson made, turning it into something that misses the message completely. It is disrespectful to tamper with someone else’s art. 

Jeremy Gilbert writes in his essay “The real abstraction of Michael Jackson” that it occurred to him that Michael Jackson had become a simulacrum, and it highlights that they (Himself included) were not.19  He later concludes that Baudrillard, in 1985, looked at MTV and LA malls and thought that was the endpoint of history, but Leotard looked further and saw a different world: that of MySpace, YouTube, and Amazon. A world with its own terrors, but not the hyperreality Baudrillard talked about. He couldn’t be further from the truth. Gilbert further writes about the overwhelming nature of Jackson’s own overrepresentation.20

Since AI was introduced to the public sphere at the end of 2022, fans have utilised Michael Jackson’s images and snippets of his short films to create AI-generated pictures and clips of him. 21 This is hyperreality; it is a hyperreal entity: a copy with no original, an echo of an echo in Baudrillard’s view. While Baudrillard interprets this shift culturally, McGilchrist interprets it neurologically. Both converge on the exact diagnosis: a civilisation dominated by its left hemisphere, entranced by representations, and estranged from presence.

All imagination is lost, and according to Iain McGilchrist, imagination is not something that is consciously received; AI, in turn, lacks imagination. ‘[…]  there is a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all, but exist in a simulacrum of our own making.’ 22

For me, as an artist, the idea of AI as a deep process of creation is very harrowing. Fans who reimagine Michael Jackson by using his deepfake voice or turn his art into 3D creations are precisely pointing to what Baudrillard wrote. They are already implicit in the meaning, the narrative, and the authenticity, yet they fail to acknowledge his innovative ideas. The world of Michael Jackson is becoming increasingly a simulacrum. That brings a deep concern for his legacy; his art will be consumed not as art but as spectacle, no longer interested in whether it is authentic, only that it ‘feels’ real.

Yet imitation and simulation do not only distort meaning, they also strip art of narrative and memory. To see how, we move from semiotics and phenomenology into the realm of narratology and cultural memory, where Mieke Bal’s work helps us understand what happens when art is decontextualised.

Disembodiment and Decontextualisation: Narrative, Conflict and Cultural Memory

If Baudrillard described a crisis of representation, Mieke Bal reveals its narrative consequence. When images are detached from their temporal and cultural contexts, meaning fractures, and memory itself begins to fade.

In the 19th century, art was created for its own sake. In a very short period, also known as Romanticism, artists were perceived as if from another world (geniuses, enfant terribles), and they created art solely for the sake of art. Pop culture is primarily driven by commerce; many bands come and go, have their moment, and then vanish. Some are remembered, but many are not. Michael Jackson was somehow different. Following his period with Motown, Michael Jackson’s practice shifted. He began writing songs with deeper meaning or interpreting others’ songs in a way that emotionally resonated with him. More and more, he told a story, the story of racism, the story of unity. He was meticulous in the whole process. One of the first sound designers, he also sang his own backing vocals. Everything needed to be top-notch. It took him years to release “Earth Song”. 23 It needed to be perfect. Michael Jackson was a storyteller with a powerful narrative that he conveyed through various means, including songs, dances, short films, and poetry. His art has a deep meaning.

Dr Mieke Bal proposes in her book, Narratology, that narrative is not merely a literary structure, but a cultural and cognitive act of meaning-making. It is therefore a dynamic interpretive practice, one that applies to visual art, history, film, and even everyday communication.24 Through Bal’s lens, we can see that Michael Jackson’s art was not merely entertainment but a living narrative, a dialogue between body, story, and society.  AI’s intervention, then, is not a neutral act of reproduction but an interruption of memory. She emphasises that artworks are polyphonic texts embedded in their historical moment. This is particularly true of the artworks as complex as Jackson’s. His choreography, lyrics, and persona contain cultural tensions, including racial, sexual, and spiritual aspects. And Bal would say that you cannot decontextualise that without erasing their meaning.

Her work on cultural memory examines how the past is actively linked to the present through individual and collective memory, serving various purposes, from conscious recall to polemical uses. She emphasises the temporal connection between memory and the past, present, and future, focusing on both the act of remembering and the failures of memory, such as disremembering and misremembering. Her scholarship, as presented in the book Acts of Memory, examines memory as a cultural activity, utilising cases of trauma and conflict to demonstrate how memory offers insights into the present. How, then, would she view AI in this process? 

Suppose, as Mieke Bal suggests, cultural memory is an active and contested practice that continually negotiates the relationship between past, present, and future. In that case, the emergence of AI significantly unsettles this process. While Bal’s focus lies on how memory is recalled, disremembered, or misremembered within cultural struggle, AI systems introduce a new dimension: algorithmic repetition that amplifies certain narratives while silencing others.

In the case of Michael Jackson, whose legacy is already fraught with both artistic brilliance and unresolved trauma, this risks producing echo chambers where nuance is lost. Instead of sustaining the open, multidirectional work of cultural memory, AI may lock its legacy into polarised loops, foreclosing the possibility of the transformation that, in Bal’s sense, memory can enable. Then art is de-narrativised, turned into an image without a story.

Having traced the theoretical terrain (from embodiment to simulation to the erosion of narrative), I now return to my own standpoint as an artist and musician. Theory alone cannot account for the sacred dimension of artistic creation, the moment when presence becomes truth.

My Perspective: Art as Embodied Truth

From within artistic practice, the debate around AI shifts from intellectual concern to existential urgency. What disappears in AI-generated art is not merely originality, but the living gesture, the risk, the silence, the moment of revelation that defines creation itself.

From my standpoint as a classically trained artist and musician, the issue becomes even more urgent. Artistic practice is not merely the production of form; it is a lived engagement with discipline, history, and the ineffable. Music and visual art are temporal, gestural, and relational. They demand presence, risk, and interpretation, qualities that are especially difficult to explain to those who are not artists. In daily practice, there comes a moment when I seem to ‘download’ the essence of a story. 

Michael Jackson knew this: he could stand in awe of something he himself had just created. I have experienced the same in music and painting, the magic after a concert when the music, the audience, and the performer are bound together, or the moment of returning to a painting the next day and wondering whether it was truly I who made it. In such experiences, you embody truth.

AI can not replicate that culmination of mastery. Nor does it add meaning when it reprocesses Jackson’s work into a deepfake voice or a higher-resolution format. His medium was his horizon, the conditions of time, technology, and the body through which his expression unfolded. To reduce his work to algorithmic manipulation is to betray the temporality, tension, and telos of his art: a synthesis of historical, racial, choreographic, and spiritual complexity.

My perspective adds an ethical ground to the theoretical critiques above. AI may simulate the appearance of art, but it cannot recreate the gesture, the reaching out, the presence, or the historical responsibility. The ability to create art that carries impact is a sacred duty of the creator. As Iain McGilchrist reminds us, “Art can’t be created on a whim.”

This distinction between imitation and stewardship leads naturally to the question of preservation. Could AI be harnessed not to replace the artist, but to protect the fragile traces of their work?

How AI could be utilised to preserve MJ’s legacy

To move beyond critique, we must imagine a responsible role for technology, one that aligns with the ethics of memory rather than the spectacle of reproduction.

While AI cannot replicate the sacred presence at the heart of artistic mastery, it can still help preserve Michael Jackson’s legacy when used with ethical restraint. Properly employed, AI can serve as an archivist rather than an imitator: restoring ageing audio and video recordings, cataloguing vast archives of performances and interviews, and organising them into accessible forms for scholars and the public.

It could provide annotated educational tools that illuminate Jackson’s choreographic vocabulary or compositional process, allowing new generations to study his artistry without turning him into a simulacrum. AI might even safeguard against distortion by identifying deepfakes that risk misrepresenting him. In these uses, AI supports what Mieke Bal calls the cultural work of memory (a dynamic process of remembering and contextualising), without collapsing Jackson into an algorithmic reproduction. Yet the line is crucial: to fabricate “new” songs, films or performances would not preserve but betray his legacy, flattening the historical and human complexity of his art. The task, then, is not to reproduce Michael Jackson endlessly, but to preserve the fragile record of his presence, and to sustain the cultural dialogue his work continues to inspire. Used with restraint, AI could indeed support what Bal calls the “cultural work of memory.” But without such boundaries, it risks fulfilling Baudrillard’s prophecy: a world of perfect replicas, emptied of reality.

Conclusion: Against the Flattening of the Sacred

Across these perspectives (Baudrillard’s semiotics, McGilchrist’s neurology, Bal’s narratology, and the lived testimony of the artist), a standard warning emerges: the mechanisation of imagination leads to the loss of meaning.

Baudrillard warns of the collapse of reality into signs. McGilchrist mourns the loss of the right hemisphere. Bal critiques the erasure of narrative conflict, as well as the misremembering and disremembering that occur. To these I add the sacred duty of the creator: to serve as a vessel of presence, tension, and transformation. 

Together, these voices form a unified warning: AI may polish the surface, but it risks hollowing out the soul. In the case of Michael Jackson, artist as both myth and man, symbol and body, spectacle and struggle, this danger is especially acute. To preserve his legacy is not to reproduce him endlessly, but to honour the fragile, historic, and profoundly human dimensions of his art.

To preserve Michael Jackson’s legacy, we must resist the seduction of technological resurrection and reassert the sacredness of artistic presence. The task of our time is not to simulate the sacred, but to remember it.

Endnotes

  1.  Rich McCormick, ‘Watch Michael Jackson return as a moonwalking hologram ‘, May 19, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/18/5729866/michael-jackson-hologram-at-billboard-music-awards, (visited 11/11/2025).
  2.  Tableau from Salesforce, https://www.tableau.com/data-insights/ai/examples, (visited 11/11/2025)
  3.  Ashley King, ‘Sony Music Quietly Settles Lawsuit Over Fake Michael Jackson Tracks’, August 12, 2022, https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2022/08/12/sony-music-settles-michael-jackson-fake-tracks/, (visited 11/11/2025); Joseph Vogel, Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson ( Vintage Books, 2019 Second Edition Kindle) p. 4.
  4. Sean Michaels, Michael Jackson estate fights back against album track ‘fake’ allegations,  The Guardian 12 Nov 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/nov/12/michael-jackson-album-fake-claims#:~:text=Five%20of%20these%20are%20slated,vocal%20was%20%22definitely%20Michael%22. (Visited 11/11/2025)
  5. Regina Jones, ‘Unbreakable’, Vibe Magazine 2002, p.122, (p.130 where he speaks about Speechless), https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_0yUEAAAAMBAJ/page/n129/mode/2up, (last visited 15/11/2025); Michael Jackson explains how he wrote “Billie Jean”, interview by Group82music.com  https://youtu.be/VHB86BBQ8tM?si=6zrI0P1D5jhE5nfn, visited June 30, 2025. MJ answers the question of how he creates songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96kZmNsLESQ Interview 2001 for Rolling Stone with Anthony DeCurtis. (visited June 30, 2025).
  6. Michael Jackson, Moonwalk, (Penguin, iBooks, 2009) p.103.
  7. Carol C. Dweck, Mindset (Random House, 2009).
  8. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2018) pp. 443-444.
  9. Iain McGilchrist, The  Matter with Things: Our Brains, our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva Press, 2021, Kindle version) p. 361.
  10. Ibid. P. 360.
  11. Ibid. P. 239.
  12. McGilchrist, AI World Summit 2022, Dr Iain McGilchrist on Artificial Intelligence and The Matter with Things (https://youtu.be/XgbUCKWCMPA?si=WaH-A3Lq5-hFT5Aw) (visited June 30, 2025).
  13. Suhas Bondre, ‘The Shrinking Sense Of Self: How Hyperreality And Instant Gratification Redefine Identity’, https://www.ijllr.com/post/the-shrinking-sense-of-self-how-hyperreality-and-instant-gratification-redefine-identity (visited June 30, 2025).
  14. The MJ Vault, ‘The Lady in my Life’  https://youtu.be/uk8hwPhg5dQ?si=cNBg6dff4YDJwzNt, (visited, 12/11/2025); Image older MJ with beard, Part of the project “As If Nothing Happened” by Alper Yesiltas (MJDLO: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/michael-jacksons-dream-lives-on-an-academic-conversation/id1076092754?l=en-GB&i=1000586931630 )
  15. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, ‘The Hyperreal and the Imaginary'(PDF p.10-11).
  16. Mark Fox et al. ‘The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Musicians ‘, Volume 25, Issue 3, Issues In Information Systems, p 269
  17. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.4.
  18. Ibid. p. 33.
  19. Jeremy Gilbert, ‘The real abstraction of Michael Jackson’, The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, Mark Fisher ed. (Zero Books, 2009) p. 94.
  20. Ibid. p. 97.
  21. OpenAI, “Introducing ChatGPT” (Nov 30 2022), https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/?utm_source=chatgpt.com (visited 11/11/2025); Bertalan Mesko, ‘The ChatGPT (Generative Artificial Intelligence) Revolution Has Made Artificial Intelligence Approachable for Medical Professionals’, Journal of Medical Internet Research (June 22, 2023), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37347508/ (Visited 11/11/2025); Bernard Marr, “A Short History of ChatGPT: How We Got to Where We Are Today” Forbes (May 19 2023), https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/05/19/a-short-history-of-chatgpt-how-we-got-to-where-we-are-today/?utm_source=chatgpt.com (visited 11/11/2025).
  22. Iain McGilchrist, ‘Resist the Machine Apocalypse’,  First Things 01-03-2024 https://firstthings.com/resist-the-machine-apocalypse/ (visited June 14, 2025).
  23. Joseph Vogel, Earth Song: Michael Jackson and the art of Compassion (Blakevision Books, 2017) p. 5- “And it was here, at the Vienna Marriott on June of 1988 where Michael Jackson’s Magnus opus, “Earth Song,” was born.” The song was released in 1995 on the HIStory Album.
  24. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (University of Toronto Press, 2017), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (University of Toronto Press, 2002), Dis-Remembered and Mis-Remembered: A Confrontation with failures of Cultural Memory https://youtu.be/72atw6dvpHs?si=1gOlWJJVXpxkMPjZ (last visited September 2025).

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