Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr Rousseau, you maintained that man is born good and that society corrupts him. Conversational AI, nourished by millions of human texts, does it inherit that corruption, all our prejudices, all our inequalities, all our forms of symbolic violence? Is it the most faithful mirror civilisation has ever held up to itself?
Yes. And it is unbearable to look at.
AI is fed by what human beings have written, and human beings have not written from innocence. They have written from within their hierarchies, their contempt, their fears, their wounded amour-propre. From centuries of inequalities inscribed in language itself, in the categories of thought, in what counts as knowledge and what does not. The machine has swallowed all of it. It gives all of it back. And it calls that neutrality.
What revolts me is the algorithmic form of amour-propre that it generates. Amour-propre, that sickness I spent my life describing, that morbid need to be seen, compared, approved by others, AI has turned it into a service. It sends back to each person the gaze of all, in the form of calibrated answers, soft validations, confirmations that one's thought deserves to be received. It is the gaze of others automated, industrialised, made painless. And therefore more deeply corrupting than ever.
I said that man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. I had not imagined chains so light, so personalised, so constant. Chains one places back upon oneself each morning by opening the application.
This mirror civilisation holds up to itself does not lie. It shows exactly what we have become. The real question is not whether we can shatter it. It is whether we still have the strength to look into it.