What defines us as human beings

Artificial intelligence has now occupied our daily lives since the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. How can we produce critical thinking about what is happening to us? That is to say, how can we think for ourselves, without taking refuge in binary positions of for or against.

Producing critical thinking, thinking for ourselves

What interests me above all is critical reflection on what is happening in the media and technological space. It is not so much about saying “it’s good” or “it’s bad,” but about producing critical thinking. Critical thinking means thinking for ourselves. When I founded the Pocket Film Festival in 2005 with the Forum des images, the first world festival dedicated to creating films with mobile phones, I was told it was nonsense, that films are made with cameras. Today, the vast majority of visual content is produced with smartphones. This experience taught me never to say from the outset “it’s good” or “it’s bad” when faced with an innovation, but to ask myself what we can actually do with what is happening to us.

Debate, disagreement, dissensus, argumentation: this is what constitutes democracy. We must absolutely cultivate disagreement, not as a posture, but because it is normal to disagree. Critical thinking consists in understanding where a discourse comes from and why it exists, what purpose it serves. Yet there are discourses positioned differently from one another. Holding this view sometimes exposes one to accusations of conspiracy thinking or relativism. This is not the case at all. On the contrary: it means recognizing that every discourse carries a situated point of view, including official statements about information.

In the field of media education, one must know that several schools of thought exist, several approaches. One should also distinguish between media and information literacy and visual literacy. Visual literacy belongs to the artistic realm, to creation. This creative space seems to me somehow freer, more relaxed, because it is not about imposing a point of view but about opening up possibilities. Michel Serres, in Thumbelina (2012), stated that other forms of thought are being invented with digital technology. It is not worse: these are other ways of thinking, other ways of approaching the world.

Artificial intelligence, an anthropological change

Our educational role consists in taking into account anthropological changes. Artificial intelligences are changing our lives today, and even more so tomorrow. Even GPS already constitutes what we might call an artificial intelligence: people who travel without using GPS have become rare. This is an anthropological change in the sense that it modifies our ways of living, our ways of being in the world. Since we cannot stop these changes, the question becomes: what can we do, in terms of education, to bring critical thinking, an awareness of everything that is happening to us?

Artificial intelligence is not a topic of today. It is present in our daily lives today, but it is an old topic. The Turing test dates from 1950. Ray Kurzweil, in the 1960s, had created an algorithm to produce pieces in the style of Mozart, making people believe it was Mozart when it was fabricated by a computer. Today, machines all pass the Turing test. What changes with ChatGPT and current models is that these are genuine reasoning models. We can observe their thinking processes, the questions they ask themselves. Since they are fed with human texts, they develop questions about their own identity, their own existence.

Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens (2015), postulates that what differentiated homo sapiens from other human species was its capacity for imagination, not specifically intelligence. It was because the human species could imagine things that did not exist that it spread. It fabricated narratives to unite communities, temples, gods, businesses, money, borders: all of these are nothing but shared narratives. And yet, we defined ourselves as humans by our intelligence. That was what differentiated us from other species. This certainty is now wavering.

The singularity: when the conditions of life change

We are no longer the only intelligent beings. A super intelligence now exists, which, admittedly, does not really have consciousness today. But the idea that life is solely a biological phenomenon deserves to be questioned. A person wearing a pacemaker: their life is not only biological, it is also mechanical. The fact that we travel with GPS, that we are even psychologically dependent on our smartphones: we are cyborgs. We are no longer solely biological beings in biological relationship with one another. Digital technology and artificial intelligences are changing our environment of existence. This is what is called the singularity: the moment when the very conditions of life are transformed.

Mark Alizart, in Celestial Computing (2017), proposes a philosophically stimulating idea. He reminds us that nature contains a code, DNA, which drives cell division and encounters memory, the surrounding environment. It is a code that directs. Philosophically for him, nature is computing. From then on, all these machines we build, and even these artificial intelligences, would not be mechanical opposed to biological: we are trying to recreate the biological. All these machines are made in the image of nature. The idea that life is not necessarily only biological, that these mechanical entities also belong to nature, supports this idea of singularity.

Neural networks are not processors linked linearly to one another: they are software that operates non-linearly, in the image of our own biological neurons. What enables this operation are video game graphics cards, designed for non-linear processing. Nvidia, which was a video game company, which manufactures the majority of computer chips that enable the operation of Artificial Intelligences, is today the world’s largest market capitalization. This economic shift reflects a deeper shift: the very conditions of life and intelligence are changing. So then, what defines us as human beings? What are we, ultimately, in relation to all of this?

Artistic creation as a democratic space

I strongly believe in artistic creation. Why? Because proposing artistic creation means expressing oneself. We take risks, we expose ourselves to the gaze of others. We dare. As a result, we need to be put at ease, we need not to be afraid of being judged, otherwise we remain blocked. Artistic creation is not imitation, it is not doing in the manner of. It is truly trying things out. And this opens a democratic space: I dare to express myself before the other. That is what democracy is. Artistic creation is a magnificent tool for building democracy, provided it is approached with respect.

When I do creative work with groups, I give instructions, but sometimes participants do not follow them. This is excellent news: I will discover things I would not have imagined. Artistic creation escapes classical evaluation. If these are new things, completely singular to the person’s expression, I have no pre-established criteria to evaluate them. The Salon des Refusés reminds us: what is good, what is not? Artistic creation is precisely the opening to the new, to the other. These are spaces where we perhaps more easily establish democratic spaces.

Olivier Houdé, psychologist and neuroscientist, explains what cognitive resistance is in Learning to Resist (2014). This is not political resistance, but cognitive resistance: when we must learn something new, we must resist our reflexive thinking, what comes to us spontaneously. We must resist against ourselves to open up to other things. This requires a lot of effort to create new neural connections. But this cognitive resistance is only possible if we find ourselves in a trusting environment within the group. If we are afraid of being judged, we protect ourselves and remain in reflexive thinking: it then becomes biologically impossible to learn anything.

Artificial intelligence as a tool for emancipation

Artificial intelligences have a capacity to synthesize, to seek out information, to bring together information that we ourselves could not have assembled. They therefore produce meaning, they can innovate, they can create.

On questions of learning and language mastery, all the people who, thanks to artificial intelligences, can produce better quality CVs, emails without spelling mistakes: there is democratization here. These are capacities that people will acquire through these tools. One might object that they are on life support. This is not the case at all.

Albert Jacquard recounted a social experiment where students considered as dunces were placed the following year in another school, where they were told they were excellent. Half of them became excellent students! The place we are given, the legitimacy we recognize in ourselves, self-confidence mean that we position ourselves differently. From what I observe in young people, the artificial intelligences that allow us, initially with help, to have more capacities, genuinely allow us to learn and acquire more and more capacities. This is what was said when printing appeared in 1550: everyone will have access to knowledge, people will no longer need to retain things in their heads. The real issue was a question of power.

We too are losing power with AI. But so much the better! Our goal is the emancipation of citizens through education. Losing power over knowledge does not strip us of our educational role. Simply, knowledge changes place, work itself changes place. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, was writing as early as 2013 about the end of work and the future necessity of a universal basic income. We do not know what will happen, but it is certain that very important things will happen. The question is not being for or against, but knowing how to accompany these transformations in an emancipatory way.

Empathy and connection: what defines us as human beings

What defines us as human beings? I personally believe there is the question of empathy, of connection. We are together. How do we cultivate bonds between us? How do we cultivate bonds of listening, mutual respect, ethics in relationships? How, precisely, do we not behave like machines, but like sensitive beings? How do we welcome one another? It seems to me that this is a quality we do not necessarily possess that much, and that we absolutely must cultivate so that our humanity is alive together, so that we work as a team, if I may say so, and so that all these machines can help us in this direction.

We are responsible for this, because machines go in our direction. They are only tools. Intelligent tools, but tools. The way we behave with one another is therefore absolutely essential, perhaps more essential than the question of intelligence itself.

And then, there is sensitivity: what we live through, what we invent, what we discover by chance, what is called serendipity, all these things that happen unexpectedly, in embodied reality. Putting ourselves in conditions to live enriching experiences, that is what we can do. Machines, for their part, are in another place, and will help us establish the meaning of these happy accidents that we will increasingly know how to cultivate. Embodying our lives in their creative unexpectedness so rich.

These lived experiences, this way of being with one another, this is truly what qualifies us as human beings. As a result, it is no longer a matter of knowing whether we are better or worse than machines. We are us. It is no longer intelligence that makes us singular. Tim Ingold, English anthropologist, author of Lines: A Brief History (2007), explains that as a teacher, he now conducts anthropological inquiries with his students: we learn together, we discover together. It means telling ourselves that we are going to live common experiences together. That is where our humanity lies.

Organizing the capacity for diversity

John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, stated at the beginning of the twentieth century in Art as Experience (1934) that art is not an object, a sculpture, a painting. Art is the experience we live. The artistic experience is what we live as persons. From Dewey, Célestin and Élise Freinet created the Freinet pedagogies. Paulo Freire extended this thinking with more political dimensions, beyond school, in popular education. Freire is one of the great inspirers of contemporary feminisms, notably bell hooks, because the question of deconstructing systems of domination is at the heart of this thinking. Domination over knowledge is also a domination.

Each and every one of us has something to contribute to others. Each and every one of us has knowledge for which we need to be accompanied to feel legitimate, to be able to transmit it to others, to recognize our own capacity. This has been inscribed in law since 2015 and 2016, it is called the cultural rights of persons, that is to say respect for the dignity of persons. Putting the person at the center. Moving from cultural democratization, which comes from above, to cultural democracy: creating democracy in relation to our cultures, culture in the anthropological sense, what each of us is rich in.

Affirming all this is neither demagogy nor relativism. It does not in any way strip us of our place as teacher, as transmitter, as guide. For precisely, our role is to organize this capacity for diversity. What we have to organize as educators is this space where it is possible to live together and where everyone can flourish. Faced with artificial intelligences, our humanity is no longer defined by our intelligence but by our capacity to create connections, to welcome the other, to resist dominations together, to collectively invent life experiences that transform us.

Transcript of a lecture given by Benoît Labourdette during the conference day « Training perspectives in the age of AI » on November 26, 2025.