AI Is a Thing We Made

The question is not whether it will replace us., but what we should do with it

As I wrote the other day, AI is not “artificial” in the way dentures, Astroturf, and aspartame are artificial.

It is better understood as artifactual.

That sounds like a small distinction. It is not.

Artificial makes us think of a counterfeit: the fake flower, the fake sweetener, the fake human mind. And once we code a thing as a fake version of us, we are left with one panicked question: will it replace us or won’t it?

That question is understandable. It is also paralyzing.

It stops thought before thought begins.

Artifactual points in a different direction. It reminds us that AI is a made thing. But it is not made out of nothing, and it is not made out of alien substance. It is made out of human culture: out of records, books, images, arguments, jokes, sermons, invoices, poems, recipes, statutes, love letters, lab reports, and what Pope Leo might call our magnificent languages.

We began by marking debts in cuneiform on clay. We went on to encode memory in alphabets, libraries, ledgers, printing presses, databases, search engines, and now models.

AI belongs to that history.

That does not make it harmless. It makes it legible.

And once it becomes legible, we can ask a better question. Not: is this a fake human being? Not: will it replace us?

The better question is: what should we do with it?

That question is worth asking because AI is not just another tool. It is not a hammer. A hammer does roughly what its maker and user foresee. AI is a stranger kind of artifact: a human-made system whose capacities are still being discovered after the fact.

That is precisely why panic is so unhelpful.

Panic makes us spectators to our own imagined replacement. It leaves us staring at the machine as if history has already made its decision.

But history has not made its decision.

We still have to decide where AI belongs, what it may do, what it must not do, who benefits from it, who is protected from it, and what forms of human judgment should remain nondelegable.

The first step is not to bow before it.

The first step is not to fear it.

The first step is to think about it accurately enough that we can govern it, use it, refuse it, limit it, and perhaps even learn from it.

Call it artificial, and the mind jumps to replacement.

Call it artifactual and another possibility opens.

It is not a fake of us.

It is a thing we made.

Now we have to decide how to wield it.