World Models and Digital Twins: Urban Simulation and Generative AI

This commentary responds to Gillian Rose's essay ‘Visualising human life in volumetric cities: City digital twins and other disasters'. It highlights Rose's recognition that City Digital Twins are always discursive projections as much as they are actual working simulations, constituted in part by a surrounding ecology of other texts and images that work to transform tech hype into tech reality. The commentary expands on the ‘twin'-nature of all digital images - how their status as both human and machine-readable objects allows them to function as simulations mediating between the realms of the computational and the sensory. The commentary concludes by exploring recent developments in moving image Generative AI. It questions the ‘world modelling' and ‘world simulation’ claims of these technologies.