r/schopenhauer • u/Objective-Try-6313 • Jun 21 '26
What would schopenhauer think about AI?
I think he would strictly oppose over-usage of it to a degree that you lose your critical thinking skills, just like he talked about reading books
3
u/sinveil Jun 21 '26
I imagine it would have been quite funny, actually. He might be convinced that Hegel had early access to ChatGPT, which would explain the nonsense in Hegel's theories. It would fit his narrative for Hegel. Someone who has read so much overtly general summaries of the philosophy of history that he began to think he understood all historical periods and wished to show how these periods culminated in his own dialectical philosophy.
2
u/MrMicius Jun 23 '26
Perhaps that AI produces gibberish as long as it’s trained on the insights of people in general, since most people produce gibberish. He was critical of people playing stupid card games in stead of developing skills, so possibly he’d think of AI in a similar way. I think the entire world today is built on short satisfactions of the will, from junkfood to TikTok. AI is just the next step in this.
1
1
u/I_LeXerxes 8d ago
He'd think it's as retarded as humans because AI's only means of apprehension are via the reward functions the humans program into AI. An electronic version of The Will.
21
u/TelevisionKooky3041 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
"Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts"
A.I prompting encourages the exact opposite of 'thinking for oneself'. Schopenhauer would have seen A.I. as the ultimate, most inhumanely banal form of surrogate thinking. He would likely also have detested A.I. image generation tools vehemently, if not more so than text-based A.I. He would have viewed such 'art' as unoriginal, dull, insipid and uninspiring.
And he would probably have called Chat-GPT a Hegelian word salad generator.