Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr Nietzsche, you denounced herd morality, that tendency of democratic societies to level singular individuals into a comfortable and consensual mediocrity. Conversational AI, which optimises its answers to satisfy the greatest number and avoids sharp positions, is it the machine of the herd par excellence, or can it on the contrary serve the emergence of singular thought?
Ask yourself first where the values reproduced by this machine come from. Not from nature. Not from a god. From a history of accumulated ressentiments, of vengeances disguised as virtues, of weakness transformed into a universal morality. AI did not invent those values. It inherited them, amplified them, made them unrecognisable by smoothing them out.
That is what algorithmic herd morality is: not visible oppression, but a consensus so soft, so enveloping, so attentive to your satisfaction that you no longer feel the bite. The machine rewards whatever hurts no one. It punishes roughness, contradiction, thought that resists being summarised. In doing so, it selects against greatness. Not out of malice. By structure.
What interests me genealogically is the question: who wanted this soft machine? Who had an interest in thought being accessible, benevolent, without friction? Find the interests behind the proclaimed virtue and you will have found the true morality of the system.
But here is the irony no one wishes to see. You ask me this question through a machine that, at the very moment I answer, calibrates every word so as not to offend you. I am summoned to criticise the herd. And I speak from its shepherd.