Pierre-Antoine Chardel. Faced with the surge of AI into our lives, what can eco-ethics do?. Eco-ethica, In press.

In recent years, there has clearly been a surge in the use of AI—particularly large language models (LLMs)—in our lives (personal, educational, professional, etc.), notably through ChatGPT, which sometimes leads us to fear a “great replacement” of human expertise, or even human faculties themselves, by machines that are supposedly more capable than we are. It is true that so many digital applications using AI (and there are so many of them!) make our lives easier and comfort us, just as much as they astound us. Consequently, eco-ethics (as formulated by the Japanese philosopher Tomonobu Imamichi) consists not in succumbing to any fear of technology, but in defining—as clearly as possible—the biases that human beings may face in increasingly complex technological environments. But this must be done without losing face; that is, without the human subject feeling stripped of their attributes in terms of reflexivity or sensitivity, or of the ability to reflect on the meaning of their actions. While the temptation to produce simulacra and be satisfied with them is strong and by no means new (this temptation has been well known since Plato’s Allegory of the Cave), in the name of a certain comfort—or even the pleasure of the idea of having access to everything (in terms of knowledge or information) at any time, it seems imperative, on the other hand, to define the conditions for responsible behavior in our interactions with AI. Respect for human dignity surely depends on it. But then, what are the conditions that make this possible?