Philosophers failing to discuss GenAI

[17-02-2026]

As someone that comes from the humanities and has also put some thought into the subject, philosophically, the concept of personhood and consciousness are very interesting to explore and poke at the limits of our society's understanding of it. But that makes me all the more frustrated when I see people from these fields completely drop the ball when it comes to discussing our current GenAI ...situation.

The fundamental problem is that fiction is not bound to the same limits that we are: The fictional artificial person is made up and can function with whatever complexity and agency the writer of the story decides they want the character to be written with without first having to establish the technology for it. This allows you to live out any thought experiment on the subject you might have and why this is, for good reason, a very common concept in sci-fi, horror and philosophy. But in real life, you can't just will such an artificial person into existence to try out your thought experiment in praxis. We would have to come up with the tech to form the basis of that first, which so far we are nowhere close to.

This is why, if you discuss current real life GenAI on the same merits as fictional artificial intelligence, it just shows a fundamental lack of understanding or a willful ignorance for how the tech actually works. Philosophy and fiction is very much used to and very much capable of discussing the theory of this subject, but now GenAI comes along and everyone gets so excited to "finally, my time to shine and apply what I learned in praxis" that they entirely skip the part where you try to actually understand the tech of what you're working with. We know how GenAI works, how it gets the results it does, and that its explicit purpose is to simulate consciousness or intelligence through statistical models. And yet, a lot of people choose to ignore this knowledge, completely take the simulation at face value, just because it allows them to flex their big boy smart philosophy muscles to come to the conclusion that actually we have to treat a LLM as a person because who are we to revoke the humanity of a thing that so clearly tells us it is a person?