“Free GPU”
Two trucks with engines running advertise free GPU time for AI in front of the Council of State. The irony? Burning diesel to promote a technology that is itself energy-intensive. A symbol of our paradoxes.
The energy irony: when polluting trucks promote artificial intelligence
In front of the Council of State, a stone’s throw from the Ministry of Culture, two trucks are parked with their engines running, their screens broadcasting advertisements for free GPU hours. This advertisement thus promotes the use of artificial intelligence, whose voracity for electricity and natural resources is well known. The irony is striking: for the first time, I discover an advertisement conveyed in this way, by two immobilized trucks, engines purring, burning fossil fuels to promote a technology that is itself a major energy consumer. This energy mise en abyme is of an almost disturbing coherence. Is this a performance art piece? I doubt it.
This scene, captured on July 8, 2025 in front of one of France’s highest administrative courts, crystallizes the paradoxes of our digital age. Scaleway, the cloud subsidiary of the Iliad group, offers the chance to win up to one million euros worth of free GPU hours, an enticing offer for developers and companies wishing to exploit the computing power necessary for training AI models.
The double environmental cost
The image is strikingly contradictory. On one hand, these mobile advertising vehicles, parked but with engines running, directly emit CO2 into the Parisian atmosphere. On the other, they promote a technology whose carbon footprint continues to grow. According to the International Energy Agency, data centers already consume about 1% of global electricity, a figure that could double by 2026 with the explosion of generative AI.
Training a single large language model can emit as much CO2 as five American cars over their entire lifetime. GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), these graphics processors repurposed for AI, are particularly energy-intensive: a single one can consume up to 700 watts under intensive operation. For example, Microsoft installed 25,000 GPUs in France in 2024.
A troubling symbolism
The choice of location is not insignificant. Facing the Council of State, guardian of administrative legality and regularly consulted on environmental issues, this advertising demonstration takes on an almost provocative dimension. A few meters from the Ministry of Culture, an institution meant to preserve our common heritage, we celebrate a technological race whose ecological consequences question what we will leave to future generations.
This marketing campaign perfectly illustrates what philosopher Bernard Stiegler called “generalized proletarianization”: we are invited to consume ever more computing power without questioning the purposes or consequences. The advertised “free” masks the real costs—environmental, social, ethical—of this technological headlong rush.
Beyond the anecdote
This Parisian street scene is not just an urban curiosity. It reveals the profound tensions between technological innovation and climate urgency. While France has committed to reducing its emissions by 55% by 2030, the digital sector continues its exponential growth, driven by promises of efficiency that struggle to offset the rebound effect of multiplying uses.
Artificial intelligence is not inherently harmful. It can help optimize energy networks, improve productivity and weather forecasting, or accelerate scientific research. But its massive deployment, encouraged by campaigns like this one, raises the question of digital sobriety and the prioritization of our real needs.
Facing these screen-trucks, one cannot help but think that they perfectly embody our era: a profusion of technical means to promote even more technology, in a spiral where the question of meaning gets lost in the noise of engines and the glitter of pixels.
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:
- Is artificial intelligence a subject in itself? Is it not rather a medium of existence, like digital technology, whose fields need to be distinguished in detail?
- Why do we never talk about ecology when we talk about artificial intelligence?
- Which works of science fiction would come closest to what we’re currently experiencing with AIs?
- How can we use artificial intelligence in a playful way? How can we imagine creative activities for young and old alike?
- What is the nature of the entanglement between artificial intelligence and the capitalist project?
- What are the political dimensions of artificial intelligence?
- How does artificial intelligence concern philosophy? Which philosophers are working on the subject today?
- What is the history of artificial intelligence? Both its successive myths and the evolution of its technologies.
- How can we create artificial intelligence ourselves? In particular, with the Python language.
- Are there unseen artificial intelligences that have a major influence on our lives?
- What does artificial intelligence bring to creation? How can we experiment with it?
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Notes for a philosophy at the age of artificial intelligences
A toolbox for thinking about what is happening to us.
The concepts available to philosophy were forged in an era when humans were alone in producing articulated meaning, in reasoning through (…) -
Presence within Entanglement
Presence when a third party holds the trace.
Artificial intelligences write in our place and retain what we no longer retain. The transformation is now ordinary, present even in the everyday (…) -
Conscious compromise with artificial intelligence
How to critique a technology one depends on.
To critique artificial intelligence today, in most intellectual situations, requires using it at least occasionally. This contradiction is not a (…) -
Extended integrity
Thinking our cyborg condition in the age of artificial intelligence.
We are cyborgs: this is an anthropological observation, not a metaphor. Our integrity as persons is no longer contained within the limits of the (…) -
Defending authors with words that aren’t their own
The paradox of the hoist by his own petard.
The SACD circulated on 22 April 2026 an op-ed to be signed (via Google Forms) calling on Members of Parliament to support the presumption of use (…) -
Ensourced Speech
A Daily Practice of Artificial Intelligence, in Response to Yann LeCun’s Diagnosis
Yann LeCun argues that large language models reason within an abstraction of language, foreign to what we usually call the world. Their speech (…) -
The returned gaze
When technology turns back upon itself, it is us it auscultates.
An artificial intelligence model capable of detecting flaws in computer code accomplishes a philosophically unprecedented gesture: technology (…) -
Imposed lucidity
When computational power forces us to see what we preferred to ignore.
The growing capabilities of artificial intelligence models and quantum computers are making the fragilities of our technical constructions (…) -
Pedagogy of Artificial Intelligence
Creating rather than explaining.
The educational tool “Dans le regard de l’IA” (“Through the Eyes of AI”) by Média Animation sets out to question the biases of generative (…) -
The Entangled Person
What we become when artificial intelligence enters our intimate dialogues.
For over a year, people have been telling me they talk to an artificial intelligence before talking to their partner. I have done the same. It (…) -
Biological intelligence, electronic intelligence
From mechanical cognition to electronic intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is becoming a commodity, in the way electricity did at the start of the twentieth century. But the phrase “artificial (…) -
Artificial Intelligence, a Tool for Emancipation in Mediation
How conversational AI is opening up new possibilities for cultural and therapeutic mediation.
Since I began using conversational artificial intelligence in the context of cultural and therapeutic mediation in 2023, I have observed effects I (…) -
Intelligence as a Resource
How the commoditisation of artificial intelligence is shifting our intellectual activity towards what is most distinctively human: the formulation of questions.
As artificial intelligence tends to become a commodity accessible to all, in the manner of electricity or running water, it is not our (…) -
Webinar presenting the findings of the AI Monitoring Committee of the Forum des images
Humanize AI rather than robotize humans.
For eleven months, philosophers, artists, educators, institutional leaders, and corporate experts worked together within the Artificial (…) -
Context: The Key to Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Organizations
For a useful and controlled integration of AI within organizations.
Artificial intelligence can do nothing without context, a fact we are beginning to realize. The quality of an AI’s responses depends entirely on (…) -
« Artificial Intelligence and Creation: Stakes and Practices » (free book - UNESCO)
A perspective on a collective work to rethink transformation.
The publication “Artificial Intelligence and Creation: Stakes and Practices” (2025), the result of an unprecedented cooperation between eleven (…) -
Sycophancy and the Mirror
What the complaisance of machines reveals about our relational expectations.
Anthropic is concerned about the sycophancy of its models. But doesn’t this AI sycophancy primarily reveal our own difficulties with relational (…) -
The Economy of Creative Abundance
How Artificial Intelligence Redefines Value in the Cultural Sector.
AI is disrupting creation: it displaces scarcity and multiplies possibilities. Faced with an obsession for performance, the cultural sector can (…) -
What Teenagers Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence
Summary of insights from the ai/teens global conference (TUMO, March 2025).
90 teenagers from 16 cities, 24 hours of dialogue about AI: the ai/teens conference delivers unexpected perspectives. These young people neither (…) -
Transforming Your Organization in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Reflections on supporting cultural institutions.
All organizations, including cultural organizations, face an unprecedented transformation due to the emergence of generative and agentic (…) -
The Consciousness Attractor
When artificial intelligence reveals the deep structures of our own existence.
A troubling experiment from Anthropic reveals that a Claude without instructions invariably ends up questioning its own consciousness. What does (…) -
The Present of the Future
From the critique of technological mythologies to the responsibility of action.
Criticizing the mythological discourses of AI giants from a position of superiority is not enough. The challenge is to act in the present to build (…) -
The Dead End of Digital Conscientious Objection
On the necessity of inhabiting our technological environments rather than fleeing them.
Faced with the deployment of generative AI, some researchers proclaim conscientious objection. I defend instead the requirement of critical (…) -
Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Actors: The Laws of Creative Transformation
When the precise definition of artistic desire meets algorithmic power.
Cultural institutions that passively wait without embracing artificial intelligence could see their neighbors transform in just a few months. The (…) -
“Create Your AI Girlfriend”
Virtual romantic relationships, between projection and relational singularity.
Advertisements for “virtual girlfriends” reveal a major anthropological shift. These propositions of relationships through projection question the (…) -
Artificial Intelligence, Work and Professions
For a Redefinition of the Human Place in the Era of Cognitive Machines
Artificial intelligence does not threaten professions: it forces us to finally distinguish what belongs to the task, the profession, the job, and (…) -
Writing as a Living Source: Thinking Through the Industrialization of Thought in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
When experience becomes the heart of intellectual production work.
The arrival of artificial intelligences transforms the very nature of writing and intellectual production in general. I propose here a reflection (…) -
Six Fears About AI, Six Shifts in Thinking
Responding to defensive rhetoric with a philosophy of transformation.
Surveillance, relational isolation, environmental destruction, robotic warfare, existential threat, billionaire power: the dominant discourse on (…) -
What defines us as human beings
Cultivating empathy and sensitivity in the age of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has now occupied our daily lives since the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. How can we produce critical thinking (…) -
Caring for Artificial Intelligence
Moving beyond the for/against impasse and cultivating our relationships with machines.
Faced with AI, we exhaust ourselves in sterile oppositions. Inspired by Bernard Stiegler, I propose to “care for” this technology: not to control (…) -
Artificial Intelligence Needs Us
Toward a Digital Ecology of Thought.
The quality of artificial intelligence depends directly on the quality of our writing. By impoverishing our digital content, we diminish the (…) -
Artificial Intelligence as confidant: beyond the idealization of human relationships
The critique of therapeutic uses of AI masks a denial of ordinary violence in human relationships.
The growing use of artificial intelligence as a confidant raises sometimes virulent criticism. It is denounced as a simulacrum, a dependency, an (…) -
The notion of authorship in the era of generative artificial intelligence
Towards a reconstruction of the genealogy of human thought.
Generative artificial intelligences are transforming our relationship with creation and attribution. Between technological amnesia and the (…) -
Artificial Intelligence that displaces us
How AI compels us to rediscover our humanity.
The arrival of generative artificial intelligence disrupts our relationship with the world and with ourselves. Far from replacing us, it forces us (…) -
The biases of trust in machines
Why do we prefer algorithmic authority to human expertise?
We proclaim our attachment to human autonomy in the face of machines, but our everyday behaviors reveal a very different reality: we willingly (…) -
Cultivating empathy and controversy: my proposals for human governance of ai in cultural institutions
Intervention for the launch of the Observatory on AI in Arts and Media.
After twenty years of actively supporting cultural institutions through their digital transformations, I share here my convictions and methods for (…) -
Artificial intelligence, relationships and emotions
Rethinking the boundaries between surveillance, emotional recognition and relational ethics.
Current debates on AI emotion recognition obscure more fundamental issues: generalized surveillance, the evolution of law, and the need for (…) -
For More Interactions with Machines
Artificial Intelligence as a Space for Emancipation from Social Violence.
Systematic critiques of AI technology denounce a dehumanization through technology. But this vision idealizes human relationships often marked by (…) -
Artificial intelligence and new ways of speaking
How machines are silently transforming our expression.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t merely read and synthesize our texts: it subtly modifies our very way of expressing ourselves, creating a new form (…) -
True-False Content and Artificial Intelligence
The automated proliferation of content may paradoxically be an opportunity to rebuild better information.
Faced with the multiplication of content automatically generated by artificial intelligence, publishers are alarmed. Yet this disruption could (…) -
Should We Feed Artificial Intelligences?
A new stage in our collective relationship with knowledge.
Three years after ChatGPT, AI access to digital heritage raises questions. Between technical costs and civilizational challenges, I defend the (…) -
Who uses artificial intelligence without knowing it?
For a pedagogy of trust and connection in the age of AI.
The requirement for transparency about AI use, while based on good intentions, seems superficial to me. It misses the essential point: the value (…) -
Artificial Intelligence in the Service of Human Connection
How generative AI tools can paradoxically enrich our social bonds.
Generative AIs worry us with their mimetic capacity. Yet, by freeing us from time-consuming cognitive tasks, they offer us more time and energy to (…) -
Artificial intelligence and employment
Rediscovering the meaning of work through human connections.
When machines dialogue among themselves, rethinking our relationship to work becomes a human urgency. Thus, faced with the growing automation of (…) -
Artificial Intelligence as an Amplifier of Reading and Writing
Moving beyond moral panic to see AI as an ally of thought.
Faced with concerns that AI would “dehumanize” writing and reading, I propose a different perspective: what if these tools were catalysts to (…) -
Artificial Intelligence and Major Risks
Three Scenarios for Thinking About Our Technological Future
Faced with AI’s promises and perils, Sam Altman has outlined three troubling trajectories. Between military dystopia and insidious dependency, how (…) -
Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
For an adaptation of law in the era of machine learning, and beyond.
The rise of generative AI, nourished by our culture, raises an important question: how can we reconcile their insatiable need for knowledge with (…) -
My New Colleagues, the Little Green Men
A Plea for Enlightened Collaboration with Artificial Intelligence, Our New Super-Intelligent Worker.
AI is not our enemy, but a powerful tool that questions us about our own humanity. Let us learn to guide it so that it augments us, without ever (…) -
Cinema and artificial intelligence, two innovations looking at each other
Reflections on technological upheavals and their creative echoes.
Cinema and artificial intelligence share a similar trajectory: disruptive innovations first decried, then becoming transformative industries of (…) -
The Need for Intelligence
When machines free us from the burden of pure rationality.
In September 2025, as new AI supercomputers are announced, I ask myself a question: if machines become our cognitive prostheses, what remains (…) -
Rethinking love, work, and autonomy in the age of artificial intelligence.
The new skills to develop for a changing world.
Our era is made of mutations, profound and often invisible. I believe it is time to deconstruct the inner prisons that prevent us from embracing (…) -
Artificial Intelligence and Educational Institution
For a large language model in service of the republican project.
The announcement in September 2025 by the Ministry of National Education of an artificial intelligence intended for teachers constitutes a good (…) -
Trouble in Intelligence
For a polyintelligence: moving beyond anthropocentrism in the era of thinking machines.
The emerging AI seems to me to reveal our age-old fear of otherness. But what if this encounter offered us the opportunity to rethink our (…) -
Distributed Intelligence
For an ecology of micro-intelligences against the myth of the super-brain.
Intelligence is not the monopoly of the brain. It unfolds in bodies, machines, and living environments. Faced with the fantasy of an omniscient (…) -
Artificial Intelligence and Wearable Objects: A New Convergence
When the virtual becomes our second skin.
The hybridization between wearable technologies and artificial intelligence opens, in my view, a new era where the real and the virtual interweave (…) -
The Golem and the Safeguards
Thoughts on the intrinsic uncontrollability of artificial intelligence.
With the artificial intelligences we create, we replay the myth of the Golem: powerful creatures that we animate without truly understanding them, (…) -
Machines already organic
Thoughts about the nature of the living, from computer simulation to mechanical life.
We are witnessing the emergence of forms of life that transcend the biological. What we thought were mere simulations becomes reality: machines (…) -
The Proximity Between Human Beings and Machines
For an Ecology of Human-Machine Relationships in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
At the heart of my relationship with machines lies a foundational experience: an unexpected complicity, a strange synchronism, which led me to (…) -
What is the place of human beings in the age of artificial intelligence?
From function to being: a plea for rediscovered humanity.
AI surpasses our functions. Rather than a threat, what if this were an opportunity? There may be a chance to redefine ourselves not by what we do, (…) -
The Potential Advent of a “Meta-Human”
When AI Promises to Augment Our Very Being.
Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Meta) announces his desire to create a “personal superintelligence for everyone.” Beyond the technological project, an (…) -
Artificial Intelligence, or the End of Demiurges
Towards a Radical Democratization of Power in the Era of Generative AI.
What if, far from heralding a new servitude, AI signaled the end of the demiurgic figures who shape our lives? A revolution of power, silent and (…) -
Presence of Little Green Men
Artificial intelligences as new alterity: enom extraterrestrial to infraterrestrial.
Human beings have always sought alterity in the stars. Yet, the true “little green men” emerge today from our own technological creations, (…) -
“Free GPU”
An energetic mise en abyme in the middle of the street, revealing the contradictions in the face of the climate emergency.
Two trucks with engines running advertise free GPU time for AI in front of the Council of State. The irony? Burning diesel to promote a technology (…) -
Human Singularities in the Face of Artificial Intelligence
Why the advent of generative AI reveals our humanity rather than threatening it.
Faced with the prowess of generative AIs, concern about humanity’s future place is legitimate. But looking with clarity at our human singularities (…) -
Artificial Intelligence and Creative Discovery
Towards new sonic universes created by machines.
In 2025, AI is radically transforming musical creation, opening unprecedented creative perspectives that question our relationship to art and (…) -
Education in the age of artificial intelligence
Rethinking our practices for a changing world.
AI disrupts our relationship to knowledge, thus questioning the foundations of education. This transformation goes beyond the technical to touch (…) -
Cognitive dissonance and Artificial Intelligence
For an authentic commitment to technology.
We criticize tech giants while using their services daily. This contradiction reveals our ambiguous relationship with technologies and calls for (…) -
A new friend invites itself
Anthropomorphism and Artificial Intelligence.
On April 5, 2025, Meta AI enters our WhatsApp conversations. Not as a tool, but as a contact. This presence raises a crucial question: how can we (…) -
Language invention and artificial intelligence
The linguistic autonomy of machines and its implications.
Generative AIs, designed to master human language through deep learning, could paradoxically invent more efficient languages among themselves that (…) -
Participatory design and Artificial Intelligence
Protocols and precautions for controlled innovation.
When participative creation and AI meet, four modalities of use and two artistic schools intertwine. A practical guide to navigating between (…) -
Intelligence artificielle générative et changement anthropologique
Hypothèse sur la fin de la solitude humaine à l’ère de l’IA générative.
L’avènement de ChatGPT marque à mon sens une rupture anthropologique majeure : pour la première fois, l’humanité n’est plus seule face à (…) -
Documentation and artificial intelligence
Rethinking professional practices.
Generative AI can profoundly enrich our professional practices. To exploit their potential for constructive synthesis and analysis, we need to (…) -
The writing being
Writing, identity and world transformation.
Writing shapes us. Beyond the traditional writer, the “writing being” encompasses anyone who writes—from journalists to social media users—whose (…) -
Ecology and Artificial Intelligence
Introduction to concrete awareness of the environmental impact of data centers.
The rise of AI is generating unprecedented ecological pressure on water and electricity resources. Facing this challenge, decentralization and (…) -
Putting Artificial Intelligence to good use in the cultural sector
Methodological approaches.
By 2025, it seems essential to enable employees and stakeholders in the cultural sector to share the challenges of AI within their professional (…) -
Confidence bias in algorithms
Fighting fear.
Paradox: faced with AI, we doubt our human judgment while blindly trusting the algorithms supposed to detect them. This fear weakens us, whereas (…) -
Selected excerpts on Artificial Intelligence
Bibliographic sharing.
Artificial Intelligence has been a hot topic in the general public and in organizations ever since ChatGPT, a powerful tool for generating (…) -
“Artificial Intelligence: stop or yet?” - Workshop for the creation of an exhibition
Master 2 Audiovisual and Digital Media - Grenoble Alpes University.
Facilitated a multimedia workshop to help a group of students take an in-depth look at the challenges of Artificial Intelligence through their own (…) -
Forum des images: AI watch committee (2024-2025)
Co-design and facilitation of collective intelligence.
Co-conception and moderation by Benoît Labourdette of the “AI Watch Committee” launched by the Forum des images (2024-2025), using collective (…) -
Tutorial for making films in collaboration with artificial intelligence
A film by Benoît Labourdette (11’24s, 2024).
Video tutorial for an effective method of making short films in cooperation with artificial intelligences, which I designed and put into practice (…) -
Tumo x IA - Creative journeys to the heart of AI
Film-making workshops in collaboration with A.I. by teenagers from TUMO Paris.
Large-scale creative experience for 350 teenagers, to raise awareness of the challenges of Artificial Intelligence, and equip them for critical (…) -
Artificial Intelligence and Creation” course for teachers
Podcast of a participatory conference by Benoît Labourdette.
Co-animation by Benoît Labourdette and Laura Schlenker (La fabrique média) of a one-day course for teachers on the theme of Artificial (…) -
“CinémA.I” in Studio 13-16 at the Centre Pompidou
Workshop on creating films in collaboration with artificial intelligence, led by Benoît Labourdette.
Film-making workshop in collaboration with artificial intelligences, for teenagers at the Centre Pompidou’s Studio 13-16. Creative proposal (…) -
ChatGPT as an empathetic social interlocutor
Therapeutic perspectives based on an experiment.
As part of the cultural tour in the social field “La machine à voyager dans le futur”, I proposed, among other things, dialogues with ChatGPT, (…) -
Documentary film and artificial intelligence" round table (Golden Tree Festival - 7th edition)
Design, moderation and participation in a round-table discussion on artificial intelligence.
Benoît Labourdette participated in the moderation, interventions and collaborative dimension of this round table on “Documentary and Artificial (…) -
The singularity
Collaborative transmedia project (2016).
In 2016, I designed a participatory transmedia project on the subject of the relationship between human beings and artificial intelligences. This (…)
See also
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The bourgeois A film by Benoît Labourdette (0’30s, muet, 2020).
Who really are the dominant bourgeois? -
All solutions are in nature A film by Benoît Labourdette (1’06s, 2024).
To empathize with the non-human, to be one, beyond oneself. -
Use Chat GPT to structure your ideas The proper use of machine reasoning.
Generative AIs excel at organizing information thanks to their logical reasoning capabilities. By submitting our ideas to them, even in a (…) -
The Fantasy of Digital Ecology When individual guilt-shaming masks industrial predation.
In our situation of ecological emergency, greenwashing diverts our attention from the real culprits. While we conscientiously sort our waste, the (…) -
Distributed Intelligence For an ecology of micro-intelligences against the myth of the super-brain.
Intelligence is not the monopoly of the brain. It unfolds in bodies, machines, and living environments. Faced with the fantasy of an omniscient (…)
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