Generative AI and the ontological inversion of the self

Background: The rapid advance of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is unsettling long-standing metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the Self. Capacities once taken to be uniquely human— such as language, creativity, and reflective thought— are now enacted by machines, forcing philosophy to confront an inversion in which the Self no longer appears as an autonomous, originating subject but as a phenomenon refracted through technological mediation.Aims: This paper examines four broad conservative responses to this disruption—residual, integrationist, relational, and hierarchical—and argues that each proves insufficient when measured against the scale of the ontological shift. The article proposes instead that the Self be re-imagined as an emergent and distributed process, constituted through assemblages of human and machine, rather than as a fixed metaphysical foundation. The aim is to sketch the limits of inherited categories and to point towards the contours of a genuinely post-singular metaphysics.Methodology: This paper employs a critical-theoretical, assemblage-informed philosophical methodology that integrates conceptual synthesis across process ontology, philosophy of technology, and posthumanist theory. It conducts a structured comparative critique of dominant interpretive stances on the Self, using theoretical deconstruction to diagnose their insufficiency under conditions of generative AI-mediated cognition.Findings: The analysis demonstrates that generative AI destabilises inherited conceptions of subjectivity by reconfiguring cognition as a distributed, socio-technical process. This inversion exposes the inadequacy of conservative frameworks and highlights the emergence of hybrid agency within human–machine assemblages across epistemic and ethical domains.Conclusion: The paper concludes that generative AI precipitates a fundamental ontological inversion in which the Self is displaced from autonomous subject to distributed, technologically co-constituted process. Conservative metaphysical frameworks fail to accommodate this shift, necessitating a post-singular, assemblage-based reconceptualisation of subjectivity, agency, and consciousness.

کلیدواژه ها:

generative AI ، ontological inversion ، self ، Singularity