ChatGPT, Postphenomenology, and the Human-Technology-Nature Relations

The idea of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of ChatGPT and other large language models through the postphenomenological approach proposed by Don Ihde. It is claimed that ChatGPT represents a fundamental shift in the relation between human and technology, and that Ihde’s analysis here contributes greatly to our understanding of how the relation plays itself out. We here suggest that ChatGPT represents a highly dynamic interplay between human beings and their natural environment. ChatGPT not only mediates between human subject and nature, but itself—by virtue of its being capable of “understanding” the text and images that are input to it—constitutes a hermeneutic agent. On the one hand, there is the relation between ChatGPT and nature through the semantic content of the huge data that it has in its databases; on the other, there is also the relation between the user and ChatGPT itself. In illustrating how ChatGPT radically reshapes our identity through embedding semantics as a fundamental perceptual activity, it is as such that we claim that ChatGPT radicalizes Ihde’s core relation between human, technology, and nature.