Young people have not lost their heads

Eight years of scientific follow-up of adolescents in Finland, the philosophy of Michel Serres, and the endlessly repeated trial of a youth said to have been dumbed down by digital technology.

We keep hearing that digital technology is making young people more stupid. In 2026, Finnish researchers published the results of eight years of measurements that run counter to this judgement, and recent research, read closely, is far more (…)

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 future we want. Technological mythologies: between marketing and world transformationIt is (…)

The Authority That Freezes Concepts

When the media entrust a notion to a single spokesperson, the notion stops evolving publicly while research goes on, and it is with this arrested version that each of us thinks about ourselves.

The media need faces: for every notion that enters public debate, they install a designated specialist, invited onto every talk show. This way of operating has a little-noticed effect: the concept freezes publicly in the state in which its (…)

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 fear nor idolize technology. They think. A conference organized by and for teenagersOn March 15, (…)

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 authenticity. The emergence of an automated musical ecosystemIn this mid-2025 period, artificial (…)

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 our relationship to the world. Parallel revolutions, from contempt to industryCinema shares with (…)

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 enrich our cultural practices rather than threats? The Recurring Cycles of Technological Fear (…)

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 examining its own material. This self-referentiality without consciousness opens a reflection on what we (…)

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 words transform reality and construct identity. The “Writer” Before and After the Internet (…)

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 honesty? sSycophancy as a technical problemIn a recent video, Kira, a researcher on Anthropic’s (…)

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 it, but to tend to our relationships with it and among ourselves. Beyond posturing: the impasse of a (…)

Mononormative Delegation

The same reflex of entrusting everything to a single entity runs through love, work, digital life and culture; artificial intelligence makes it both more dangerous and easier to undo.

We entrust our entire emotional balance to a single person, our entire memory to a single platform, our cultural representations to a single studio, and already part of our thinking to a single model. I propose to call this reflex mononormative (…)

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 this convergence tell us about the nature of AI and about ourselves? The Fixed Point of Existential (…)

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 profound, may be underway. The New Tech Titans Facing Their CreaturesWhen we hear statements from (…)

AI in Service of Democratic Transformation of Cultural Institutions

Methodological proposal inspired by process management, adapted to cultural sector values.

Artificial intelligence is most often deployed to optimize production chains, for example through their digitization to create a digital twin in order to find ways to reduce costs and increase efficiency. In the subsidized cultural field, the (…)

The machine that writes to itself

How reasoning came to language models.

Since late 2024, language models have been “reasoning” before they answer. I retrace here the path by which reasoning came to these statistical machines, from the discovery of 2022 to Anthropic’s interpretability research, so that this (…)

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 anthropological mutation is perhaps taking shape: that of the meta-human. Artificial Intelligence at (…)

The living abecedary

Building, during an event and with artificial intelligence, the abecedary of the words that run through it, and keeping it alive with the participants.

We propose to build, right in the middle of an event (a colloquium, a seminar, professional gatherings), the abecedary of the words circulating there: from the recordings of the talks, artificial intelligence helps retrace how the debates have (…)

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 first step, which is necessary. For my part, I suggest going further, through the creation of a (…)

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 on a rich and specifically human way of shifting intellectual work: from drafting toward capturing (…)

The idea bank

A treasure chest for the scriptwriter.

Build a very simple, scalable and efficient tool to solve all types of problems in scenarios. What makes up storiesStories, mainly human ones, organize sequences of situations, emotions, sequences and effects, each one unique, but in which (…)

“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 expressions, images, voice, sound, AI tools, immersive techniques... with the aim of creating an (…)

The last straw

Why the anger against artificial intelligence rarely aims at the right target.

We hear a great deal these days that artificial intelligence is destroying jobs, and the anger against it keeps growing. I would like to shift the focus. What is happening did not begin with AI but forty years ago, with personal computing, and AI (…)

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 upon the philosophical and political: how do we educate emancipated citizens in this new world? (…)

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 biological body; it extends into our machines, our data, and now into the artificial intelligences (…)

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 preserve our humanity in the face of machines that increasingly resemble us? WhatsApp: from simple (…)

Displaced Resonance

Extending resonance to the age of artificial intelligence.

Hartmut Rosa describes our living relationship to the world along three axes of resonance: the relationship to others, the relationship to work and things, the relationship to nature and art. In the age of generative artificial intelligence, I (…)

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 would completely escape us and could transform the world without our knowledge. Explanation of why (…)

When the real does not exist, one cannot speak of it

On speech as the manifestation of the real, and silence as the body’s lucidity.

We often reproach certain people for not knowing how to speak about what they live in their relationships. I want to argue that their silence is not always a deficiency of expression, but sometimes the lucidity of someone who recognises that, in (…)

Control the machine by thinking

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’04s, silent, 2019).

Reasoned bibliography of our relationship with future in 2019.

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 to explore what makes us irreducibly singular. The Inner Journey: When Elsewhere Transforms (…)

Cultural investigation with artificial intelligence

Towards an open, non-directive methodology for revealing the unexpected.

How can we transcend the limitations of traditional cultural surveys? By combining spontaneous dialogues and AI analysis, a new approach could allow us to discover what we would never have thought to look for. The limits of traditional surveys: a (…)

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 thinking. Project stakes and shapeThe Forum des images, as part of its digital school for teenagers (…)

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 Artificial Intelligence. The issue is not whether to “adopt” AI or not, but to understand how this (…)

The arte povera of artificial intelligence

Why primitive models, low resolutions and machine hallucinations are a poetic resource in their own right, and what the fantasy of technical perfection would make us lose.

The artificial intelligence industry promises ever more perfect images, indistinguishable from reality. I defend the opposite path. Old, open, frugal models produce glitched, strange forms that are an artistic material in their own right, and (…)

Art and artists as society’s infrastructure

What cultural rights oblige us to say about the political function of artistic practice.

A society without artists cannot stand. The claim is easy to state and hard to argue for. Here I try to ground it, by bringing together a proposal from Australia, the surveys on amateur artistic practice, and what cultural rights teach us about (…)

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 difference would depend neither on resources nor training, but on dynamics that I believe are (…)

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, but by what we fundamentally are. The mirror of our functional incompetenceA tweet reporting a (…)

The question of criteria

Hierarchies, forms of mind and creation, in school and at university, in the age of artificial intelligence.

What do we measure when we evaluate? Artificial intelligence brings back to the surface an old question, that of the function of criteria in school and at university. This question reaches deep into what learning means, into what institutions do (…)

Différences

Un film de Benoît Labourdette (1’30s, muet, 2017, pseudonyme : Albert D.).

Philosophie des techniques confrontée à sociologie humaine.

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 structured text from a query, went public in November 2022. Indeed, as stakeholders, we are touching the (…)

Is artificial intelligence going to replace us?

Possible talks on artificial intelligence, creation and critical thinking, for cultural teams, schools and universities, local authorities and companies.

This is the question that always comes, and it hides several others: fear for one’s profession, anger at companies that feed on authors’ work, the feeling of being left behind, and sometimes a curiosity one dares not show in front of colleagues. (…)

The singularity, a collaborative transmedia artistic project

“The singularity” is a collaborative transmedia project, launched in 2016 by Benoît Labourdette. Around a thematic spine, over a long period of time (several years), film creations, theatrical forms, exhibitions, creative workshops in various (…)

The screen discourse

Proposing a concept, in dialogue with Freud, Benveniste, Bateson and Goody, to understand how we can sincerely hold discourses that contradict our own practices, without seeing it.

Adults, phone in hand, deplore the time children spend in front of screens. Teaching materials critical of artificial intelligence are produced with its help, without anyone saying so, or even thinking about it. I propose to call “screen (…)

“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 very nature of human connection and love. The epistolary as the historical foundation of (…)

An advocacy document written by twelve people in one afternoon

The story and method of the collective writing workshop I facilitated on 6 July 2026 at the BnF, during the presentation day of the national project for the future of audiovisual media in public libraries.

During the presentation day of the national project for the future of audiovisual media in libraries, on 6 July 2026 at the BnF, I facilitated a workshop to write an advocacy document aimed at elected officials. Here I describe what this (…)

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 opportunity for renewal, they force us to rethink the notion of authorship. Machine Creativity and the (…)

Training Eyes in the Age of AI: A Day to Rethink Image Education

Account of a professional training day where teachers, librarians, and young people in civic service explored the challenges of artificial intelligence through creation and critical debate.

On November 26, 2025, in Reims, around sixty education professionals gathered for a training day entitled “Training Eyes in the Age of AI.” I contributed to its design and led an afternoon conference and workshop to enrich critical thinking (…)

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 cognitive capabilities of the language models that feed on it. But even more importantly: by depriving (…)

Data Centers: We Fill Them Ourselves

Telling projects apart, deliberating on our tools, bringing our data home, equipping ourselves for collective intelligence: what we can do together as data centres multiply.

In an op-ed published in Le Monde on 14 August 2026, Stéphane Troussel, president of the Seine-Saint-Denis departmental council, calls for a pause and for public consultation on the development of data centres. I agree with him, and I propose to (…)

Crafting cultural narratives with artificial intelligence

A one-day training session for the staff of a local authority’s cultural service.

A proposal for a one-day training session for staff of a local authority’s cultural service. The aim: that participants leave able to produce, on a regular basis and using methods drawn from collective intelligence and artificial intelligence, (…)

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 change. Between technological revolution and social emancipation, a reflection on our capacities for (…)

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 presence and empowerment through practice. The trap of disembodied critiqueSeveral researchers, notably (…)

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 uses of the telephone. What it modifies in our manner of being present to the world and to others (…)

The skill as a work of art

Writing not a work but a way of doing, transmissible to a machine: an artistic form is quietly being born, and it has ancestors.

Among everything that artists can create with artificial intelligences, a new form is discreetly appearing: the skill, a text that teaches a machine a way of doing. Writing one’s method rather than one’s work places this practice within a history (…)

The Journalist and His Mirror

An Epistemological Critique of Media Literacy Education by Those Who Produce Media.

Media and Information Literacy (MIL) entrusted to journalists poses a structural problem that media sociology has documented: how could those who produce information be its lucid critics? Reflections after attending three hours of training by a (…)

Generative AI, education and culture: recommendations drawn up between three countries

A look back at the colloquium “Between Creation and Simulation”, held within the framework of the Weimar Triangle (France, Germany, Poland) by the Genshagen Foundation and the Initiative Urheberrecht, 7 to 9 July 2026.

From 7 to 9 July 2026, twenty-two experts from France, Germany and Poland drafted together a set of educational policy recommendations in response to generative AI. I took part. Here I explain why this meeting took place, how we worked and what (…)

« 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 UNESCO Creative Cities from six countries, constitutes an interesting initiative designed to (…)

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 ethical education. Generalized surveillance: a more immediate danger than emotional recognitionI (…)

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 rethink our relationship with the documentation of our activities. Anthropological changesWith the (…)

Cultural investigation with artificial intelligence

An open, non-directive investigation method, based on spontaneous dialogues analysed by artificial intelligence, to discover what one would not have thought of looking for.

We are developing a method and a tool for cultural investigation that start from informal speech rather than from questionnaires: spontaneous dialogues, gathered over time, which artificial intelligence helps analyse without a predefined (…)

Invisible artificial intelligence

Authors are fighting over images generated by artificial intelligence. That conflict concerns only the visible part of a much larger transformation.

I am preparing to run a month-long residency with NEF Animation on the ecology of storytelling in animation cinema, where the use of artificial intelligence is a matter of dispute among filmmakers. These quarrels bear on generated images, that (…)

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 specifically human to cultivate? The industrialization of intelligenceIn this month of September (…)

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 Intelligence and creation, organized by the Délégation Académique aux Arts et à la Culture of the Grenoble (…)

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 seemed urgent to think about what is happening to us. Where I speak fromThis article is itself a (…)

“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 that is itself energy-intensive. A symbol of our paradoxes. The energy irony: when polluting trucks (…)

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 the proper respect for intellectual property? AI, a new cultural “being”?Generative artificial (…)

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 domination, and ignores the emancipatory potential of machines for those excluded by the system. (…)

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 transparent. Faced with this exposure, the reflex of sequestration is always temporary. What is needed is a (…)

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 should we think about our relationship with these technologies? But above all, how can we think (…)

Enlarging the Silo

An account of the collective intelligence process carried out with Le Silo, in southern Essonne, from May to June 2026.

Around a reinforced concrete grain silo built in 1907, inhabitants, artists and heritage professionals worked together, from May to June 2026, to lay the foundations of a museography about ways of inhabiting the world. This is the story of how (…)

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 rethinking our political engagement. Industrialists: opportunists rather than ideologuesIt has (…)

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 as part of the Tumo x AI workshop in June 2024 at the Forum des images.

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 had not anticipated. An absolutely patient, absolutely respectful interlocutor that never judges (…)

Media and ai education through creativity

Account of a training session: when artificial intelligence becomes a pedagogical tool for developing critical thinking.

What if artificial intelligence became a tool for developing critical thinking? Account of a training sequence that proposes to rethink media education through creativity, humility, and collective experimentation. A reimagined training for (…)

The machine artist

The question of who is an artist shifted a first time with the democratisation of creative tools. It is shifting again with machines that write and make images.

The boundary between professional and amateur artists became porous with the democratisation of creative tools. A third figure is now appearing, the machine that writes and makes images. I propose to think about it through the image of the child, (…)

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 scattered manner, they can reveal coherent structures and unexpected connections, often very useful. Obvious (…)

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 AI accumulates perils. These concerns deserve examination. But their very formulation prevents us (…)

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 of a text lies in its reception, not in its genesis. Moving beyond the logic of surveillanceThe (…)

Technology, presence, use and innovation

Methodological elements for innovation.

Innovation does not come from technical mastery but from the singular use we make of it. Faced with AI and new technologies, it is our presence to ourselves that enables creative and personal applications. How not to fall behind?We often (…)

Scriptwriting and artificial intelligence: towards new subjects?

Anthropology of contemporary writing.

Since ChatGPT in 2022, generative AI has been transforming our ways of creating and thinking. These technologies, linked to artistic forms, are reshaping our worldviews. I invite you to explore, in an unconventional and perhaps slightly (…)

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 delegate our decisions to them. The Paradox of Our Voluntary SubmissionDiscourses on artificial (…)

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 reclaiming digital sovereignty appear as pathways to sustainable solutions. The Dialectics of (…)

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 project was embodied in a website (https://www.la-singularite.com/), but didn’t get any further (…)

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 the real issue is our relationship to our humanity, regardless of the tools used. The unconscious (…)

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 nonetheless enters our own speech, quietly. I seek here a daily practice by which to inhabit this (…)

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 moral scandal. It says something about our contemporary condition, provided we pay attention to it. A (…)

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 until they merge. Computing or the history of growing intimacyThe history of computing objects (…)

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 allows us to distinguish them from the capabilities of artificial intelligence, and to identify (…)

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 relationship to all forms of intelligence that surround us? The illusion of human superiorityA large part (…)

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 the work. This clarification, far from being a catastrophe, opens the way to what I propose to call (…)

Cultural summer 2023 with Cultures du coeur: “The machine that travels into the future”

Account of the first workshop of a tour of digital creation workshops in the social field.

During the summer of 2023, Cultures du cœur is proposing to eight social structures in France that their beneficiaries participate in the creation of collective and individual stories on the theme of the future. Graphic, video, musical, digital (…)

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 propositions, in fabricating written works, in dialoguing through language. With generative artificial (…)

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 recruitment, I propose to question our practices. Rather than optimizing CVs to seduce algorithms, (…)

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 necessity of maintaining this feeding. Generative AI, an anthropological mutation of our relationship (…)

Work Without a Share

Faced with artificial intelligences, we fear being replaced, and since we do not know what to do with this fear, we reassure ourselves by seeing them as machines like any others. By comparing them to immigrant workers, Yuval Noah Harari breaks this frame and opens a question we were not asking: that of their place.

As long as we hold artificial intelligences to be mere tools, the question of their place does not arise. Yet these agents do the work of employees with the status of tools: their fabrications come back to whoever puts them to work, the fee goes (…)

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 of works by AI systems. The text reached me by email, like all members, and it is manifestly written (…)

Sa bêtise, c’est sa force

Le manque de bon sens des intelligences artificielles, que Yann LeCun leur reproche, est la marque d’une cognition qui n’est pas la nôtre, et c’est de cette différence que nous avons le plus à recevoir.

On reproche aux intelligences artificielles de ne rien comprendre, de se tromper sur des questions qu’un enfant résout, et de consommer des ressources énormes pour y parvenir quand elles y parviennent. Je propose de regarder les choses autrement (…)

RAG, or how to give an AI the power of a business tool

A technique that turns a general assistant into a tool specific to our work.

A RAG is what lets an artificial intelligence become a business tool, specific and relevant to our work. The word is technical, the principle is not, and Laurent Alexandre recently declared that a company head who does not know what it is should (…)

The Tilting Mirror

What AI does to our certainties, and the effort that remains ours to make.

I had asked Claude to help me show that an op-ed by the SACD had been written by an AI, and it lined up the evidence. Serge Tisseron suggested I reverse the request, and this time go and question other models, asking them for arguments proving (…)

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 AI, let us instead cultivate ecosystems of small intelligences in dialogue. Questioning the (…)

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 Intelligence Oversight Committee, launched by the Forum des Images and TUMO Paris. I facilitated this (…)

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 the quality of the context it is provided. For cultural organizations, this reality opens a major (…)

Documentary film and artificial intelligence" round table (Golden Tree Festival - 7^th 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 Intelligence”, to situate the philosophical and political stakes of the use of artificial intelligence.

The Land We Cultivate

The ownership of the means of computation is becoming a major political question, as the ownership of land once was.

We used to own our tools; we now rent our means of thinking. Software, music, films and artificial intelligences are used by subscription, on distant machines that belong to others. I propose to read this situation across two long spans of time, (…)

“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 conceived by Benoît Labourdette, which took place during the winter vacations of 2024.Write a script, (…)

To Code or Not to Code?

A Plea for Reclaiming Our Digital Tools.

The distinction between “code” and “no-code” is a deception. Instructing a machine, regardless of the language, is an act of creation. Reclaiming this power means shaping our professions and increasing our capacity to act. The Paradox of Lost (…)

Generative artificial intelligence and anthropological change

A hypothesis on the end of human solitude in the age of generative AI.

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 upheavalI have long been interested in the subject of the technological (…)

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, which proved effective in terms of psychological support.At the request of Cultures du cœur for the (…)

Contribution cannot be commanded

Placing a person or an artificial intelligence in the position of executant produces execution; inviting them to contribute produces something entirely different. But the invitation comes at a price, which explains why it is so rare: accepting to let go of part of one’s power.

The position we assign to the other determines what he or she can give: assigned to execution, the person executes; invited to contribute, they enrich, question, displace. I verify this law in the human groups I work with as well as in my (…)

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 abandonment of “real” human relationships. This discourse rests on an unquestioned premise: human (…)

Not Letting Go of the Controller

A summary and discussion of the strategy document “Making, thinking and learning when capability is no longer scarce”, published by the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in July 2026, on education at a time when making, thinking and learning can be delegated to machines.

In July 2026, the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies published a strategy document that rethinks education, starting from one observation: artificial intelligence makes intellectual capability abundant, and what becomes scarce is authorship (…)

Born in the Machine

Toward an Anthropology of the Interface.

Five weeks spent in an incubator at birth, in a sterile environment where the only contacts came from the caregivers through the sleeves of the apparatus and the continuous sensors of the medical machine. My parents could only see me through a (…)

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 keeping artificial intelligence in service of the human community rather than the reverse. (…)

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 context, to explore its potential, and to implement responsible and cooperative uses, for a better (…)

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, and whose control escapes us by their very nature. Beyond marketing discourse: an authentic concern (…)

The Subtle Presence of the Metaverse

A presence without bodily co-presence, where our social functions take their place in our absence.

We declare the metaverse dead, judging it by Meta’s headsets. But the metaverse is not a world you enter, it is the space in which our social functions become present without the co-presence of bodies. I propose to think it through the decoupling (…)

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 enslaving us. Easy to say, but how to do it? AI, a Peculiar Partner: From the Threat of Replacement (…)

Cultural Rights and Digital Technology

Rethinking digital tools in service of cultural democracy.

How can digital technology become a lever for cultural emancipation rather than an instrument of dependence? I propose a digital implementation of the eight fundamental rights, to open concrete democratic pathways. From democratization to (…)

The social cost of coherence

What it costs to live in coherence with one’s values, what it costs society when we do not, and how these two costs feed each other.

Among the most committed people, and within each of us, there are precise zones where commitment ceases to operate, without our seeing it. I propose to understand these zones through three mechanisms, the radical monopoly of tools, face-work in (…)

A specialist in your pocket

What becomes of the figure of the specialist in the age of artificial intelligences, and why this question engages the very architecture of our dependencies.

Each of us now carries in our pocket a machine that answers as a specialist in almost everything. What can one still be a specialist of? I propose an answer here, the bond between people, and I put it to the test of the history of publishing, (…)

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 innovation and mastery. Two approaches to participative creationParticipative creation is a (…)

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 of triangular communication. Artificial intelligence as the new privileged readerI was able to (…)

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 about what is happening to us? That is to say, how can we think for ourselves, without taking refuge (…)

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 invent an economy of creative robustness. Performance or Robustness: Which Model for Creation in the (…)

The Fribourg Declaration analysis tool

Analyse your project through the eight cultural rights of the Fribourg Declaration, and draw from it a working basis for the team.

We are developing a tool that guides a team through the analysis of its project using the eight rights of the Fribourg Declaration: the project is described, examined right by right, and the tool produces a written synthesis that serves as the (…)

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 intelligence methods, to produce thinking and useful recommendations for the cultural and education (…)

Is nature a computer system?

Hypothesis for a digital naturalism.

The philosopher Mark Alizart, in “Celestial Computing” (2017), explores the idea that nature is computing, bringing together the living (DNA, genetic code) and the mechanical (machines, AI). By retracing the history of computing, from Pascal to (…)

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 intelligence” covers very different realities, and its history is shifting. Mechanical cognition, the (…)

Cognitive air conditioning

Artificial intelligence is to thought what the air conditioner is to the body: an aid that puts us back in a condition to act. What remains is to choose its technology, its construction and its place in the shared environment, so that it does not manufacture inequalities all over again.

I propose a concept, cognitive air conditioning: artificial intelligence as an aid to thought and action, just as coolness puts a body back in working order. An aid is neither a triumph to celebrate nor an abdication to deplore; it is judged by (…)

What is the purpose of a screenplay?

A transient and unlocatable object.

A screenplay serves two functions: to convince and to organize. AI challenges this transitional format by enabling more flexible and interactive creation, without eliminating traditional methods. Paths for experimentation, to renew cinema, so (…)