One measure of the gradual advance of media technology is how we think about the phrase “virtual representation”. There was a time when a book was thought of as a virtual representation of reality — fictional or otherwise.
Then we stopped thinking about books so much, and we started thinking about photographs as virtual representations. Eventually photos became too familiar to think about too much, and we started to think about movies and then television as virtual representations.
A while back, long after we stopped thinking of movies or TV as novelties, we started applying the idea of “virtual representation” to computer simulations of reality — fictional or otherwise. But now we are about to move on to the next phase.
The resynthesis of words or images performed by ChatGPT or Bard or MidJourney or DALL-E is the current focus. “But wait,” people think, encountering those programs for the first time. “They are just a kind of virtual representation, not the real thing.”
Which you could also say about books.