I don’t know that I see the difference - but I suppose we’re getting into Brains In Vats territory. In my view (well, Baudrillard’s view, but who’s counting?) a perfect description of a thing is as good as the thing itself, and we in fact interact with our semantic description of reality, rather than with raw reality itself - the latter, when it manifests in humans, results in vast cognitive dysfunction - Sachs wrote somewhat in the topic of unfiltered sensorium and the impact on the ability to operate in the world.

So yeah. I think what these models do and what we do is more similar than we might realise.