Posthuman Sociality of AI-Simulacrum

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of a new psychotic reality (A.P. Sidenkova) emerging in the period following the post-humanist turn – a new normality, the post-truth era, the post-COVID era, and the rise of post- and non-human actors in the form of AI-agents (LLMs, GPTs, chatbots). Psychotic reality, as a reality in which people become utterly alienated from themselves, projecting their own non-human (void) nature, associated with death, non-being, Nothingness, toward AI-agents, manifests itself in a crisis of meaning, in a drive toward madness, or delusion in psychiatric terms. The aim of this article is to critically examine AI as a new form of non-human sociality, a subject, and a moral agent within the framework of the posthuman turn. The objectives of the article are as follows: a) to analyze contemporary generations of AI as subjects, moral agents, and typical representatives of posthuman forms; b) calling the technological singularity into question; c) examining the post-human turn as the root cause of the emergence of LLMs. A philosophical-anthropological method is employed to analyze LLM systems from the perspective of 'digital undead.' Critical and deconstructive approaches are applied to problematize posthuman sociality. The novelty of this work lies in the idea that AI does exist but it does not think – that is, it exhibits anti-Cartesian behavior, being a simulacrum. The work also examines a diagnosis associated with the phenomenon of a new psychotic reality – AI-psychosis – which arises as a result of a person's own AI jailbreak. The conclusion is drawn, that AI cannot be either subject or agent, yet it can directly shape a new psychotic reality. Being born of the void within humanity, AI serves as a perfect mirror capable of reflecting our madness and casting it back upon us. This article will be of interest to researchers of artificial intelligence systems, humanism, posthumanism, the technological singularity, and the posthuman turn, as well as to the specialists in philosophy of medicine, particularly psychiatry.