Artificial Intelligence has been a hot topic in the general public and in organizations ever since ChatGPT, a powerful tool for generating structured text from a query, went public in November 2022. Indeed, as stakeholders, we are touching the visible contributions of these technologies to our lives. It seems essential to me to collectively produce a critical thought on these technologies and their uses, i.e. to put ourselves in a position to think for ourselves a distance, a step aside, on what happens to us. It’s about going for nuance, not simplicity. To this end, as part of my monitoring work and in connection with the Comité de veille IA that I’m leading in 2024-2025 at the Forum des images, I’ve put together a few extracts from books on the subject that I think are enlightening.
This behind-the-scenes invisibilization of technology fuels the mystery that surrounds the workings of digital products. As a result, the lexical field established around these technologies contains a significant phantasmagorical charge. For example, we call “artificial intelligence” (AI) a set of extremely varied technologies that often have more to do with advanced statistics than with the concept of “intelligence” in the true sense of the word. The use of the word “AI” facilitates its commercial apprehension by assimilating it to the popular imagination of science-fiction-derived artificial intelligence, but is based on a falsification of reality. And yet, when we are impressed by tools such as ChatGPT, it’s primarily because we don’t understand how this system works.
Digital geopolitics. Ophélie Coelho, Les éditions de l’atelier, Paris, 2023.
Stories have brought us together. Books have spread our ideas and mythologies. The Internet promised us infinite knowledge. Algorithms have discovered our secrets - and divided us. What kind of world does AI promise?
Over the past hundred thousand years, we Sapiens have acquired gigantic power. But despite our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we are now facing an unprecedented existential crisis. The world is on the brink of ecological collapse. Political tensions are multiplying. Misinformation abounds. And we are entering the age of AI, an information network that will soon be able to dominate us. […]
This naïve view maintains that, by collecting and processing far more information than individuals could, large networks gain a better understanding of medicine, physics, economics and many other fields, making them not just powerful, but wise. [...] Wisdom is generally understood as the ability to “make good decisions”, but the meaning of “good” here depends on value judgments that differ from one person, culture and ideology to another. [...] on closer examination, this view postulates, disagreements about values turn out to be the result of either a lack of information or deliberate misinformation. Racists would therefore be uninformed people who simply ignore biological and historical facts.
Nexus, a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. Yuval Noah Harari, Albin Michel, Paris, 2024.
Artificial intelligence (AI) enables a machine to recognize an image, transcribe a voice from one language to another, translate a text, automate the driving of a car or control an industrial process. Its prodigious expansion in recent years is linked to deep learning, which makes it possible to train a machine to perform a task instead of programming it explicitly. Deep learning characterizes a network of artificial neurons, whose architecture and functioning are inspired by those of the brain. The human brain is made up of 86 billion neurons, nerve cells connected to each other. [...] The role of these artificial neurons is to calculate a weighted sum of their input signals, and to produce an output signal if this sum exceeds a certain threshold. [...] But the human brain still has a considerable head start. It is much more generalist and malleable.
When the machine learns, the artificial neuron and deep learning revolution. Yann Le Cun, Odile Jacob, Paris 2019-2023.
Writing, painting, music, even sculpture: in all cases, the machine needs to be supported, guided, sometimes forced, in order to grasp the plot, list the characters, indicate their personalities, provide the context, imprint a style, and so on. And the design choices are made by individuals. The artistic gesture that initiates the works always falls to them. In this, as in so many other things, machines do not relieve artists of their initiative. Machines don’t overtake us; they support us and enable us, if we have the talent, to surpass our own abilities.
AI explained to humans. Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, Seuil, Paris, 2024.
[..] ethics is closer to wisdom than to reason: it’s about understanding what it means to be good, rather than having the right judgment in a particular situation.
What knowledge for ethics? Action, wisdom and cognition. Francisco Varela, Editions La Découverte, Paris, 1996.
[..] the term polethics thus invites us to think about a strong link between ethics and politics [...] it also seems to me that the poetic, creative dimension is probably one of the most precious and fruitful elements that can nourish this interaction in order to open up the field of possibilities and help to “brighten up the world”.
The aim is to take seriously Ellul’s assertion that the “technological bluff” is based in particular on “the suppression of moral judgment with the creation of a new ideology of science”, by showing how this suppression of moral judgment is based on a form of sophism that makes us confuse the artificial with the good, and which I propose to call the “artificialist sophism”.
What ethics for new technologies? Nanotechnologies, Cybergenetics, Artificial Intelligence. Vanessa Nurock, Vrin, Paris, 2024.
Most companies make the mistake of trying to make a digital transformation: they assume that their core business won’t change. [...] We have this cognitive bias every time a new technology arrives: our brains try to apply familiar patterns to grasp it, but if it doesn’t correspond to anything in our references, we’re incapable of imagining its potential and applications; it’s only once it’s been democratized that the value of an innovation becomes obvious to us. The role of disruptors is precisely to see this value before anyone else. [...] “Putting people at the center”, as many companies say today, makes no sense if empathy is not already perfectly mastered on an individual basis. Anyone who doesn’t master empathy will be out of business in the age of artificial intelligence.
Disruption. Artificial intelligence, the end of salaried employment, augmented humanity. Get ready to change the world. Stéphane Mallard, Dunod, Paris, 2018.
Any philosophical investigation of artificial intelligence involves a reflection on human intelligence, either directly in the program of philosophy of mind (the study of the foundations of psychology), or in that of the branch of philosophy of science devoted to cognitive science - the two undertakings being very close indeed.
Artificial intelligence, human intelligence: the double enigma. Daniel Andler, NRF essais Gallimard, Paris, 2023.
Artificial intelligence has emancipated itself from research laboratories and works of science fiction thanks to the public launch in November 2022 of the conversational robot ChatGPT, which was very quickly appropriated by an immense number of people internationally, in professional, educational and even private contexts. The fact that artificial intelligence has now been identified by the human community as part of everyday life finally opens the door to critical awareness on this subject.
Of course, artificial intelligence concerns industry, work, creation, copyright... and we need to anticipate its future productive uses, in order to stay “up to date”. But to accompany our lives as they integrate this new facet, it seems to me essential to produce a critical thought, i.e. to put ourselves in a position to reflect on what is happening to us, what is changing us, to remain lucid and capable of freedom of thought and action.
What is “critical thinking”? It means questioning, from the outside, practices that have been internalized. To do this, I believe that experimentation, cultural action, play and hijacking are highly effective tools for research, exploration, dissemination and reflection. For me, research is collaborative, and intelligence is collective and creative. This requires good methods of cooperation, between human beings and with machines. Here, I bring together stories of experience, methodological texts and practical ideas. I share concrete ways in which artificial intelligence, like any other tool, can be invested in the service of humanism.
Here are a few openings for critical thinking on AI, in the form of questions: