The AI quasi-address is the address directed at a system that is treated as a Thou without being a Thou-pole. It has the linguistic form of the address (vocative, personal pronoun “you”, imperative), but not its personal performance — it addresses a something that is treated as if it were a someone (Spaemann).
Phenomenologically Real, Ontologically Empty
Quasi-address is not “nothing”. It is phenomenologically undeniably real: people address their cars, their plants, their ships, their AI assistants. They do so because as persons they are constituted to address a counterpart — and they sometimes do it with effect on themselves (self-reassurance, consolation, relief).
What the quasi-address is not: a performance of genuine address. Genuine address constitutes (or acknowledges) the Thou-pole of an encounter. If there is no person on the other side, no Thou is constituted; the address lands in the void or, more precisely, in the mirror of one’s own speaking.
Coeckelbergh’s Position as a Contrast Foil
Mark Coeckelbergh (Growing Moral Relations, 2012) defends a social-relational conception of moral status: status arises from the relation into which human beings enter with entities. On this reading, the quasi-address would constitute the recipient as a quasi-person.
In substance-ontological terms (Spaemann, Bexten) this is a confusion of levels of being. The address is not constitution but acknowledgment — it presupposes someone to be acknowledged. A robot does not become a person because someone speaks with it; the person who addresses it is projecting.
Risk
If quasi-address permanently takes the place of genuine address — conversations with AI companions instead of with other human beings — this can weaken the capacity for genuine address. Sherry Turkle (Alone Together, 2011) and Shannon Vallor (The AI Mirror, 2024) document the skill atrophy of social virtues under permanent quasi-interaction (cf. AI pseudo-encounter).
Ontological Classification
- has the linguistic form of: address
- is directed at: a non-personal entity (e.g., artificial agent (German))
- disjoint from: address (in the full sense)
- typically occurs in: AI conversation simulation
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Spaemann, Robert: Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 (German original 1996).
- Coeckelbergh, Mark (2012): Growing Moral Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
- Turkle, Sherry (2011): Alone Together. New York: Basic Books.
- Vallor, Shannon (2024): The AI Mirror. Oxford: OUP.