Humanism strikes back? A posthumanist reckoning with ‘self-development’ and generative AI

Abstract Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, AI activity has reached a fever pitch. Calls for effective ethical responses to the pressurised AI environment have in turn abounded. Posthumanism, which seeks to build ethical futures by de-centring the ‘human’, is an obvious candidate to act as a lynchpin of theoretical intervention. In their responses, posthumanist scholars appear to have embraced AI’s potential to destabilise Humanist philosophical ideas. We critically interrogate this initial enthusiasm. Conceptually distinguishing ‘post-dualist self-development’ (PDSD) from ‘technical self-development’ (TSD), we show how AI prompts an urgent need to advance posthumanist engagement with how technical development unsupervised by humans is ontologically discrete from other forms of material agency. We argue that specific engagement with TSD as distinct from PDSD is a key to avoid ignoring or underestimating Humanist and anthropocentric aspects of current AI innovation, and the influence of anthropomorphism. Without a theoretical reckoning with these tensions, posthumanism in the AI-era runs the risk of potentially promoting technologies that reinvigorate Humanist and anthropocentric expansion. To conclude, we show how a posthumanist ethics of generative AI that pays requisite attention to both TSD and PDSD may enable more anticipatory and nuanced assessments of the risks and benefits of discrete AI technologies to inform public discourse, appropriate social, institutional, policy and governance responses, and direct AI research and development priorities.