AI: The Final Insult to Humanity
May 8, 2025 | 1,022 words | 5min read
A bit shorter than usual, but I liked this too much to banish it to Tangled Thoughts, where no one—including me—would ever see it again.
Insult to Humanity (Kränkung der Menschheit)
“Insult to humanity” is a term coined by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. It refers to the gradual dethroning of humanity from its perceived central and superior position in the universe due to various scientific advancements:
Cosmological Insult: The Copernican Revolution marked a paradigm shift—from the belief that the Earth was stationary at the center of the universe, to the understanding that the Sun is at the center of the solar system and the Earth orbits around it. (There’s a great anime about this: Orb: On the Movements of the Earth)
Biological Insult: With the discovery of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin, humans were no longer seen as uniquely created by God but as part of the animal kingdom, shaped by the same natural processes as all other life.
Psychological Insult: The discovery of the unconscious mind revealed that much of human behavior is not governed by conscious thought, but by hidden, unconscious processes. (My favorite example is the hungry judge effect).
Why am I talking about this?
There’s a fascinating phenomenon emerging on the internet: artists are expressing deep frustration with artificial intelligence. Painters criticize models like Stable Diffusion and DALL·E, which can generate images in various styles at high quality. Writers and programmers similarly protest large language models (LLMs) capable of producing text, stories, and code with impressive fluency (Gemini 2.5 can produce whole applications). But this reaction may point to something much bigger.
We might be witnessing a fourth insult to humanity:
- Computational Insult: The realization that many abilities once thought to be uniquely human—such as creativity, strategy, and language—can now be replicated by machines. Think of AlphaGo, GPT-4, Claude, and Stable Diffusion.
This could explain the intense emotional reaction. With each of the historical insults, humanity’s privileged position in the cosmos has been diminished. But until recently, we still believed we were uniquely creative.
That only we could make brilliant Go moves.
That only we could produce beautiful paintings.
That only we could write pleasing prose and poems.
That only we could make anime opening sounds.
That only we could craft alluring songs and soundscapes.
And so on. Better examples are emerging every day.
This last bastion of human ingenuity—our creative spirit—has been shaken. In combination with the ongoing secularization and meaning crisis, this has lit the fuse on a barrel of black powder—a psychological explosion of anguish, denial, and resistance.
What Is a Human?
The fundamental question before us is none other than: “What is a human?” And how does this relate to meaning?
The ancient Greeks—particularly the Stoics—believed that the world was embedded with a telos, a purpose or reason for being. By examining what made one thing unique compared to another, one could discover its telos, and through that, its meaning. For example, what makes a fisherman uniquely special? It is that he fishes. Thus, the job, goal, telos, and meaning of a fisherman is to fish. Similarly, a construction worker’s telos is to build.
We can apply this reasoning to ourselves: what makes humans uniquely special when compared to everything else in nature? Whatever that is would point us to our telos. For the ancient Greeks, what made us special was reason—we were the only beings in nature capable of rational thought.
But as we’ve seen, even this has been eroded by the rise of large language models. LLMs now regularly outperform humans in many reasoning benchmarks, they are even better than us in judging social situations.
A very similar question, often asked before the rise of LLMs, was: What differentiates humans from animals? Common answers included emotion, reason, and consciousness. But none of these hold up—animals possess all of them, albeit to a lesser degree.
So what is left?
Before the emergence of artificial intelligence models, the go-to answer was language. No other animal can convey abstract concepts as we do. Sure, some animals can communicate simple messages like “Look there! Danger!”—but the ability to abstract and share that abstraction is what drove the success of the human species.
Yet this too has now been challenged. LLMs have become so skilled in conversation that the Turing Test is no longer taken seriously as a measure of consciousness or intelligence—because machines are now regularly passing it.
My Perspective
I believe this is one of the greatest things that could have happened to us as a species—not because of the scientific and material progress AI promises to deliver, but because it breaks the illusion that humans occupy a uniquely special place in the cosmos once and for all. There are no more comforting lies to hide behind. Now, each of us must confront the existential angst head-on.
If humans are no longer uniquely special, then we are left with two possibilities: either everything is special, or nothing is.
If everything is special, this new picture strongly supports pantheism—the belief that nature and God are one—as held by the Stoics, Spinoza, and, to some extent, Schopenhauer. For if everything is special, what makes everything special if not a spark of divinity embedded in all things?
On the other hand, if nothing is special, then we must create our own meaning on Earth. Be it, as Nietzsche proposed, through the exercise of power; as Camus suggested, through rebellion; or as Sartre argued, by choosing a set of values and committing to them with sincerity.
But this decision, as Kierkegaard described, between everything or nothing—between faith or reason, a world filled with mystery or one governed by logic, the divine or the mundane, Jerusalem or Athens, comfort in the bosom of Mother Nature or in the precision of mathematics and science—is criterialess. There is no guiding principle, no objective signpost to lead the way. It is a choice that must be made axiomatically, and each of us must make it. There is no way around it. Even not choosing is, in itself, a choice.
So choose—and choose wisely.
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