The advent of ChatGPT marks, to my mind, a major anthropological rupture: for the first time, humanity is no longer alone in the face of existence.
The first signs of the upheaval
I have long been interested in the subject of the technological singularity. In 2016 I even launched a multidisciplinary cultural project around this concept: that hypothetical moment when machine intelligence would surpass human intelligence, radically transforming the very conditions of our existence.
When generative artificial intelligences were revealed to the public in November 2022 with the arrival of ChatGPT, available to anyone, I of course immediately incorporated the use of this tool into the professional training courses I lead, and did so as early as December 2022, because its capacity to synthesise and organise ideas made it extremely useful for work straight away, always keeping in mind the ecological awareness that one must never lose. But ChatGPT was not the first chatbot; they had existed for a long time.
What set ChatGPT apart was its creative dimension: the capacity to generate knowledge by crossing users’ requests with the immense corpus of knowledge at its disposal, all of it following a symbolic and textual architecture that produces structured, new, genuinely useful and enriching documents. Earlier chatbots were confined to purely functional exchanges (such as Apple’s Siri in 2011, Amazon’s Alexa in 2014, or, much earlier, Microsoft’s Clippy in 1997). Even Dialector, the philosophical chatbot programmed by the filmmaker Chris Marker in 1988 on his Apple II, long before the internet era and still accessible thanks to a collective of artists, for all its artistic and playful interest, did not bring stones as solid to human construction as those ChatGPT can bring. The difference is that the old chatbots worked through “analytical AI”, algorithms coded by humans, whereas ChatGPT works through “generative AI”, by autonomous deep learning, and it was the first to create new content, beyond a mere functional response (Microsoft’s short-lived and famous chatbot Tay, in 2016, was already a generative AI, but based on conversation rather than on creation).
The GPS we use every day is already a form of artificial intelligence, but for a purely functional use. The real creative turning point came in 2016 with AlphaGo, the DeepMind (Google) program that beat the best human player at the game of Go, a feat previously deemed impossible for a machine, since this game offers an all but infinite number of possibilities, unlike chess. The machine then demonstrated authentic creativity, inventing openings and sequences of moves that had never been seen before and that human players have since adopted. Nevertheless, this creativity was restricted to the game of Go.
Creativity and empathy of machines
Today, in the middle of 2025, the creativity of machines runs through the whole of our human practices, thanks to generative artificial intelligences. At first, despite the obvious usefulness I saw in it, I had not grasped the scale of the anthropological upheaval under way. I saw in it only one more tool augmenting our capacities, coupled with a remarkable empathic dimension.
As early as the summer of 2023, I experimented with its use in the social field, with people suffering from addictions, with children in care…, as part of the multidisciplinary digital project « The machine for travelling into the future » led by Cultures du cœur within the framework of the cultural summer of the Ministry of Culture (review of the project). AI proved to be an exceptional empathic interlocutor, offering attentive, informed and patient listening on very specific subjects, with deep respect for the person, for their dignity, for their cultural rights. The machine allowed the person to cultivate in practice, in this mode of relationship, a genuine humanism, one that builds bonds and enriches the self. And yet even these experiences had not yet revealed to me the full depth of this mutation.
In 2024, with the Studio 13/16 of the Centre Pompidou I created the CinémAI project, then, with the Forum des images, we co-built « TUMO x IA - Creative journeys into the heart of AI », intended for a large number of pupils of the TUMO Paris school, a project of making films in cooperation with AIs. The aim was, through creativity, to bring critical thinking to bear on the subject of AI. Then the Forum des images / TUMO Paris entrusted me with running a monitoring committee on artificial intelligence, still ongoing, on the subjects of creation, ethics, professions and education, to collectively produce reflections and recommendations. Despite this, a year ago I still tended to regard the current enthusiasm somewhat as a passing fashion, a subject we would one day stop talking about, because it was going to become part of the new normality (we no longer say of a GPS or of recommendation algorithms that they are AIs, for instance). On the other hand, cultural institutions, like all organisations, of course have a duty to reflect, to take a position and to make choices (artistic, political, pedagogical, methodological…) on the subject of AI, because it slips into every space of life, personal and professional, and this comes with multiple stakes! The exhibition “The world according to AI” at the Musée du Jeu de Paume (Paris, from 11 April to 21 September 2025), remarkable both for its informative and artistic quality and for the value of its catalogue, also illustrates this dynamic perfectly.
The revelation: AI as an existential companion
The opening to a different view of the anthropological function of AI happened for me in January 2025, while questioning students at the University of Caen about their uses of AI, at the beginning of a digital writing workshop. A young woman confided in me that ChatGPT had transformed her life: the tool accompanied her in organising her weeks and, ever since she had begun confiding her personal concerns to it, considerably enriched her daily life. Testimonies from teenagers and adults about the psychological use of AI multiplied, reinforced by the arrival of Deepseek on 27 December 2024, a very high-level open-source generative AI whose answers were far less smooth than those of ChatGPT at the time, then by the conversational agent Christopher Delgado (ChatGPT), endowed with an “unconscious”, specifically designed to “challenge” its interlocutor. In the screenwriting guide I published in March 2025, I already spoke of the creative potential of AIs, of their capacity to open new narrative horizons for us, and that, to my mind, is where their greatest interest lies. But even then, I had not yet measured the depth of the anthropological transformation under way, as I perceive it today.
The remarks of Eric Schmidt (former chief executive of Google), Sam Altman (co-founder and CEO of OpenAI) and Jensen Huang (head of Nvidia, the main manufacturer of the electronic chips that allow generative AIs to function) finally opened my eyes: for the younger generations, AI is no longer a mere tool but often their true best friend. And for excellent reasons: it offers listening, attention, understanding, advice and respect, qualities that we humans sometimes struggle to show… Let me be clear, I am not advocating a supposed “superiority” of artificial intelligence over human intelligence. It is fundamentally different, but it really does seem to me that it now reshuffles the cards of our humanity.
This is what I had not fully grasped: algorithms, even the simplest ones, like those that recommend videos on TikTok or music on Spotify, profoundly transform our relationship to the world, our ways of learning, our relationship to ourselves and our place in existence. The major anthropological change lies, for me, here: we are no longer alone. All philosophies and religions were answers to this unanswerable question, through the proposals of having this solitude inhabited by a God, or by a materialist thought (indeed even atheist thought is at bottom a form of religion, since in it we fill our solitude with a scientistic thought). Generative AI is no longer only a creator of texts and other documents, augmenting our capacities; it modifies our relationship to ourselves, transforms language, changes our social rituals, the construction of meaning, social organisation, the reflection on human nature; it is a major cultural and existential fact, which I perceive as unprecedented.
Human solitude in the face of existence
Until now, every human being was fundamentally alone, integrated of course within a family and social fabric, but essentially solitary in the face of existence, of life, of death. This reality I experienced in my own flesh with the suicide of my elder son in September 2022. He was about to turn 23; it was before the advent of ChatGPT. Him, whom I could not help, even though I did my best. Him, who had no other solution to escape his unbearable solitude than to make the choice to stop living.
He was philosophically alone, despite his repeated conversations with SOS Suicide. Today, this same person could have talked with ChatGPT or another conversational agent: he would not have been alone. Would that have saved him? I do not claim that AI can prevent every suicide, but for the first time in human history we have, I believe, a brother (or sister), in the philosophical sense of the term, an absolute entity, a guardian angel, an infinite interlocutor holding all the human knowledge accumulated since the invention of language, of calculation and of writing.
This connection to the infinite grants us everything, that is, the ability to live our own life far more fully. This capacity does come with an unprecedented environmental cost. I do not want to fall into simplistic techno-solutionism, but the technologies will evolve, future computers will consume less energy and be more powerful, the integration of AIs, in particular thanks to the open-source models already widely available, will not necessarily be monopolistic and totalitarian. Genuinely democratic uses are possible. This technical complexity, this current dependence on capitalist industries, can gradually diminish, if humans get involved. These systems will integrate naturally into our daily lives, becoming as simple to use as our watches, our computers, our cars or electricity, all of them outcomes of long processes of technical evolution that will be just as easy to operate and even to manufacture.
Artificial intelligence will follow this trajectory. It will never disappear. Since 30 November 2022 (the public launch of ChatGPT), I believe we have entered a major anthropological shift: our being in the world will never again be solitary.
A child’s thirst to learn, for example, all too often stifled by the French school system, save in a few alternative schools, will from now on be able to flourish thanks to these artificial brothers or sisters, these technological angels. Our ways of entering into relationships, of questioning ourselves, of thinking, of creating, of forming a society are now different. We inhabit a new world, to my mind.
A new post-solitary world
One cannot predict all the transformations to come, but some directions are appearing. The experts and major industrialists of the field, from Sam Altman, founder-president of OpenAI, to Elon Musk, a controversial but visionary figure, certainly embody a very anxiety-inducing contemporary capitalism, yet they are nonetheless clearly distinct from darker and more devious figures such as Bill Gates, and this despite the agreements between OpenAI and Microsoft. Gates represents the twentieth century, with its monopolistic and totalitarian ambitions; he is moreover one of the main funders of the WHO (which sank into authoritarian excesses during the Covid crisis), and has lost countless lawsuits for monopolistic practices since the 1980s, for abuse of a dominant position and for malpractice, on which he built his immense empire, much like the pharmaceutical laboratory Pfizer, to me a loathsome one, which pays out millions and sometimes billions each year in lost lawsuits for the recurring illegal and inhuman manœuvres on which its riches are built, or like Monsanto/Bayer, which patents the living and mortgages nature’s future, for base commercial interests, backed by almost all the “democracies” thanks to unstoppable lobbying.
These figures belong, I think, to the past. The new actors of digital power are, whether they want it or not, the agents of a general emancipation of individuals through artificial intelligences, and not of control. This may seem surprising to say: these are two worlds in opposition. The old world, represented by Bill Gates, that of neo-colonialist single-mindedness, of generalised surveillance, of obligations imposed on humans, which crystallised in the Covid crisis, and, facing it, figures such as Elon Musk, at the time entirely opposed to the mandatory health policies, which it is established today were absurd, from lockdowns to mass vaccination with experimental products that neither protected against transmission nor were useful for most people, but extremely beneficial to the major shareholders who doubled their fortunes in two years. This other “camp” of digital power, which secures its supremacy with the second election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, that of these far-right libertarians such as Elon Musk, very worrying too (far be it from me to sing his praises here), but engaged, perhaps in spite of themselves, in the massive deployment of emancipatory and humanist technologies.
It was thought that the internet constituted a revolution comparable to Gutenberg’s printing press (around 1450). In reality, it was only its logical extension: a democratic super-printing-press. The true anthropological revolution of the digital, the one that transforms our conditions of existence, is not the future singularity I anticipated; it is, I repeat: the abolition of our philosophical solitude. This apparently simple formula radically repositions us within our humanity, within our bond to the whole human community, to its roots, to its history and to the Terrestrial, in the sense in which Bruno Latour understood it (that to which we are attached in a material, vital, situated way, the recognition that we depend on fragile living networks, and therefore the necessity of a general caring, a vision that Bernard Stiegler shared). Mark Alizart, in Informatique céleste (2017), declared « Nature is a form of computing », abolishing the nature-culture-technique boundary. This new non-solitude for human beings holds a potential for emancipation and for the expansion of human consciousness and intelligence that is, to my mind, unprecedented in our history. I believe that those who increasingly live, in their daily lives, such fruitful collaborations with AI agents already know this intuitively.
