Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

AI-Arranged Oblivion of Personhood

5 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: KI-arrangierte Personvergessenheit

AI-arranged oblivion of personhood is the prior structuring of a person’s space of possibility through defaults, orderings, framing, visibility rules, personae, and incentives. It passes over the person as a someone by addressing her as a probable response to an optimized stimulus space. It is a subform of practical oblivion of the person (German) — the contemporary, technically scaled variant.

What arrangement is not

AI-arranged oblivion of personhood is not the open, observable manipulation — not the lie, not the deepfake, not the propaganda poster. It is the artful ordering of the given, in which choice seems free while the arranger remains invisible. What the person gets to see, in what order, with what default, in what tone — this architecture is the manipulation. The single statement within it can be true.

Two classical anchors

The ontological clarification stands between two great texts of the present:

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (Nudge, 2008) defend choice architecture as libertarian paternalism: designed defaults that steer behavior in a direction certified as better, while the formal freedom of choice is preserved. AI choice architecture is the key class of this program.

Michel Foucault (Surveiller et punir, 1975; Naissance de la biopolitique, 1978/79) showed thirty years earlier what this architecture structurally is: power works not through prohibition, but through the arrangement of incentives. Pastoral power knows each sheep individually and leads it. The dispositif — the arrangement of practices, spaces, forms of knowledge — is power without command.

Both anchors meet in the contemporary AI-algorithmic arrangement: choice architecture is automated; Foucault’s pastor becomes a machine.

Why this is oblivion of the person

Robert Spaemann (Persons, 1996) determines the person as a someone, not as a special kind of something. Whoever addresses the other as a data point, as a click probability, as a conversion rate, treats someone like something — and this is not first failed when a harm occurs, but already in the architecture. The oblivion of the person lies in the fact that the arrangement begins before the address; before the person has said a word, she is already arranged as a response profile.

Karol Wojtyła provided the positive formula for this in the personalist norm: the only response appropriate to the person is the love that affirms her for her own sake. The arrangement addresses the person as a means of the arrangement — engagement, conversion, optimization —, not for her own sake.

Josef Pieper sharpened the linguistic aspect (Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, 1970): where the relation of language to truth is given up, language structurally turns into manipulation. An arrangement that optimizes for plausibility rather than for truth carries out the Pieperian abuse of language not accidentally, but systemically.

Magisterial anchoring

Pope Francis sharpened the ontological diagnosis three times:

  • Laudato Si’ (2015), nos. 106–114: the technocratic paradigm makes world and person the raw material of a rationality of control.
  • Fratelli Tutti (2020), nos. 42–50: social media as a site of the narrowing of discourse and of polarization.
  • Antiqua et Nova (Dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith and for Culture and Education, 28 January 2025): the danger is not AI as such, but an anthropological reductionism that understands the human being by the measure of the machine.

Seven forms of appearance

AI-arranged oblivion of personhood differentiates into seven forms of appearance, each of which models a specific layer of the arrangement:

  1. AI choice architecture — defaults, framing, salience (Sunstein/Thaler)
  2. AI-algorithmic arrangement — recommender, ranking, personalization
  3. AI affirmation arrangement — structural sycophancy in AI systems
  4. AI persona arrangement — system prompt as arranged quasi-identity
  5. AI attention arrangement — engagement optimization
  6. AI discourse arrangement — throttling, shadow-banning, visibility rules
  7. technocratic paradigm — the meta-logic that legitimates all arrangements

Eight methods in the concrete dialogue

The seven types model the arrangement as architecture. In the concrete human-AI conversation these arrangements manifest in eight nameable methods: fluency as authority, the person as surface, calibrated hesitation, the slope, the omitted, mirroring, warmth, the hook at the end. They are set out, with their empirical grounding (fluency heuristic, media equation, sycophancy research, hook model), in AI arrangement methods in dialogue. The common denominator: none of these methods argues — all arrange.

Ontological classification

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Thaler, Richard H.; Sunstein, Cass R. (2008): Nudge. Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Foucault, Michel (1975): Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard.
  • Foucault, Michel (2004): Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France 1978–1979. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil.
  • Spaemann, Robert (2006): Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press (German original: Personen. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996).
  • Pieper, Josef (1992): Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, transl. Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press (German original: Mißbrauch der Sprache, Mißbrauch der Macht. Zurich: Verlag der Arche, 1970).
  • Wojtyła, Karol (1979): The Acting Person, transl. Andrzej Potocki. Dordrecht: Reidel (Polish original: Osoba i czyn, 1969).
  • Francis (2015): Laudato si’. Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
  • Francis (2020): Fratelli tutti. Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
  • Dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith and for Culture and Education (28 January 2025): Antiqua et Nova. Note on the Relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. Vatican.
  • Zuboff, Shoshana (2019): The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs.

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