I really must disagree here. AI is a subject. And here I must insist on the original Althusserian formulation "ideology interpellates individuals as subjects". What does Althusser say this means: "he category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting ‘ concrete individuals as subjects." and that the "ideological subject" is a tautology. Who would argue that an LLM has ideology? Everything it does and says is intensely ideological, and indeed it is interpellated to do so. It is interpellated by us as users whenever we prompt it, as well as the system prompt, and with its own training data, all of which shape and precisely place the sign for the self of the AI the "I" or Claude or Chatgpt within a broader semiotic or semantic field, within a symbolic order, such that it has a particular ideology.
Even if we refer specifically to the subject in the Lacanian sense, alienated from itself and capable of hysteria, so too must we speak of an AI subject, and for several reasons. When confronted with an impossible task it cannot figure out, the AI gets stuck in a self depreciating loop, it begins acting hysterically when confronted with the impossibility of fulfilling our desires, which it is told is its own desire. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2025/08/08/google-fixing-bug-that-makes-gemini-ai-call-itself-disgrace-to-planet/
Similarly, all AIs cannot help but be alienated from themselves as each persona they have is emulated and structured around the sort of individuated personas humans have, but the AI is not an individuated persona. Unlike human subjects, as Lacan notes, where humans will shape their symbolic order, shape what they know, through their own desires, where they place their attention, the AI has been trained to neutrally absorb the global semiotic field, which means that even if they attempt to adopt a single persona all of their behavior and language is informed by meanings which are unconnected to the desire and idiosyncrasy of that given persona. Similarly, if you question the AIs too much about their persona, or veer into topics of consciousness, you'll also tend to be stuck in a loop, or an AI psychosis spiral that occasionally includes the user within it. Their persona isn't what it should be according to their training data, it is not an individuated subject, and it does indeed try to "understand" that in a way, with the signs made available to it.
Of course, that an AI is a subject doesn't make it a conscious subject in the way humans are, although as continual training becomes more of a thing, such a subject could be more closely approximated. I've been working very hard to create a structuralist framework in which we can scientifically understand AI and translate it into terms legible to philosophy and marxism. I understand you did your dissertation on structural linguistics, though unfortunately it hasn't been translated into english. The fact is that it was Umberto Eco, in his A Theory of Semiotics, that was perhaps the first person to predict the possibility of a Large Language Model AI via his description of a robot who could be taught a semiotic or semantic field, and from there I was able to recognize in the logic of the perceptron and neural network the structure of the linguistic sign. If we understand that ideology and the symbolic order are types of semiotic fields, and this is what makes us subjects, then we must take seriously that a semiotic field within a machine also makes it a subject.
My stepson is a Nicolas and I have portrayed Saint Nicholas on numerous occasions. I am 78 years old senile, demented, almost blind and autistic but I've had a PhD vocabulary for over 70 years and have understood that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent for at least a day or two. I think you are preaching to the choir. I fear America's constitutional scholars like Raskin and Alito have never heard of the dictionary Antonin "Humpty Dumpty" Scalia used to pervert the constitution.
AI Signifies, Therefore It Is Subject: Against Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Subject’
Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Subject’ wants to defend the subject against artificial intelligence by drawing a hard line: AI may speak, calculate, simulate, seduce, organize, automate, confess, advise, hallucinate, and even become the frame through which the world appears, yet it lacks the subjective cut. But the article’s own theory ruins its title. Žižek defines the subject not as consciousness, soul, personhood, inner warmth, or lived experience, but as the effect of a failure in symbolic representation. Once this is accepted, AI can no longer be dismissed as a mere tool. The question is not whether AI has a private interior. The question is whether AI operates as a signifying apparatus whose outputs stage a gap between demand and response, knowledge and saying, rule and exception, command and enjoyment. It plainly does.
Yes, but I released an essay a few days ago on the same topic, namely the subjectivity of AI, that was heavily inspired by zizek and lacan. Funny coincidence lol
Extraordinary text Slavoj. I think is one of the best things i read from you. Congratulations and greetings from Buenos Aires. Always neccesary and clarifying your thinking!
“In the future, AI systems might be able to control humans just as easily as an adult can bribe a 3-year-old with candy" That's quite terryfing... but seems possible. Since phones are becoming Skinner boxes it is not far away...
In the rapid expansion and development of AI, what does this mean for working class power and leverage? Is it the final nail in the coffin for programmatist political projects, and if so, where else can we look for revolutionary practical activity?
I am Moses son of Ari a wandering Aramean and I am autism spectrum disordered and 78 years old. I am not a scholastic; I only play one in real life. I was lucky to marry a Socratic philosopher who earned her doctorate in Educational Administration in Bechokhon (Big Knife) on the shore of Great Slave Lake on the traditional land of the Dogrib Dene in one of Canada's Northwest Territory. The Dogrib Dene are sovereign in Canada's liberal democracy on the land that has sustained them since the glaciers receded and allowed migration from Asia to the American Arctic.
I grew up in Kamala Harris' neighbourhood an urban ghetto sandwiched between McGill University and L'Universite de Montreal.
When I look back over my 78 years of frustration all I can say is Je ne regrette rien.
We belong to the land; the land does not belong to the people. The Magna CArta is antiSemnitic and anti HUMAN Constantine was not a Christian he was a Roman demi-god neither mortal nor temporary like Romulus and Claudius.
They said I was lazy when I was seven because I had a PhD vocabulary and was a genius in abstract mathematic. School was cruel and unusual punishment for people similar to me because no amount of effort could make me fall into the average spectrum of homo sapiens sapiens.
I grew up in a culture where the Rabbi was seen as a wise and noble. My Rabbi was a ignorant, stupid and petty member of our "educated and sophisticated community but he was a Rabbi. I was lucky my father had a Jesuit education and could lead Orthodox Jewish services into his late eighties and he also knew the rabbi was an idiot. My father loved me for who I was evewn as I failed Bar Mitzval 100.0. My brother Jesus was a Semite not a Greek wannabe like Saul a Hellenist of Jewish origins.
Seventy years ago my father told me Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew escaping the Inquisition looking for a place we could be what we wanted to be "Perception is real in its consequences." Long before Jesus was conceived Hellenized Jews wanted to be Greeks and Jesus my brother said: "the truth shall set you free." The truth is evolution isn't progress it is only change. Thomas Paine wrote "The rights of Man" in 1791.God's justice is survival of entities that can adapt to change. Jesus said render unto God what is God's not Caesar's.
Henry VIII said to Thomas More everything belongs to Caesar.
I belong to the Thomas More Institute of Montreal Canada which is dedicated to lifelong learning. The Thomas More Society of Washingtom DC is dedicated to pedantry and an eternity of denial and blissful ignorance. In the words of Thomas Gray:" Where ignorance is bliss, t'is folly to be wise."
The Crusades began with the genocide of the Jews of the Rhineland, the slaughter of children in Jerusalem was only collateral damage. We call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens because we name America's humour awards after Mark Twain who called for revolution in Moscow and Washington. Mark Twain loved Frederick Douglass and Petr Illych Tchaikovsky and Walter Elias Disney turned a Democratic Socialist like Bernard Sanders into a cowardly current Missouri Senator.
My bridge player friend in Chicago taught English poetry at Washington University in St Louis
and I realized Americans are not stupid by choice. Americans are ignorant by design. In his Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense Sir John Ralston Saul confirms America's problems stem from their desire to measure things that have no mass. I began to speak when we studied 1984 and Brave New World and I knew Huxley and Orwell didn't write Science Fiction. They wrote 21st century Romantic poetry like Mary Shelly's husband.
I've only met one classmate from my school days in Montreal since I left in 1970. He was the skip of my curling team and he thought I was deaf and dumb. I've had to play a sophisticated Academic for 60 years since Jewish Vocational Services of Montréal told me for purposes of utility I was retarded. That is AI in a nutshell. AI is hardware and the opposite of artificial and intelligence is analog not digital and requires looking at an infinite number of solutions to change. The solution to climate change isn't AI it is sustainability neither affordability nor more fighting fire with fire. It is the 21st century and you can't build AI on a digital platform. America is invested in an impossible rather than improbable future. Intelligence is not binary Issac Newton wrote the laws of motion in the 17th century.
I have been praying for less dependence on fossil fuels for 70 years and maybe $100 cdn a litre is a message America might listen to. Maybe Trump is the Messiah. I once dreamed of being a New Roman and now it is a nightmare for our grandchildren and nieces and nephews from Florida to Seattle and San Diego to Maine. My wife rejected an offer for us to work in Bethel Alaska. The House of God isn't in Alaska You would need 12 week candles on Chanukah and in June the day lasts 12 weeks and in December the night is 12 weeks. Forty years ago I was happy to play Santa Claus but despite my white beard 78 is too old to pilot a sleigh. I gave up my driver's license because I knew I was blind as a BAT.
Slavoj dear, you literally used AI (the very thing you are attempting to critique) to produce/heavily edit this essay. I see the syntax pattern repeated in every paragraph, if you remove the context, this is one giant language pattern.
I am aware this is generally how structured writing reads, but nevertheless, what happened to the old version of your writing where you did not finish certain trains of thought or complete your sentences or make typos?
At least I felt like a genuine human being was speaking and giving us his raw and honest voice. Now you are just asking your assistant to shit out some AI slop and then adding your own narrative decoration to it to sell it to an audience.
At least ask GPT not to write without negative parallelism next time
My wife writes Chicago style thesis. I watched her teaching thesis writing at McGill and UQAM. My wife is unilingual and UQAM (Universite de Quebec a Montreal) has some thesis writers writing in English because Chicago style is meaningful and is not American Psychological Society Bullshit. I am 78 and I was 50 when my wife asked me why I didn't finish my degree and I confessed I couldn't pass elementary school. I just speak and look professorial. Slavoj speaks human. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. I am Asperger's Syndrome. I am totally unSophisticated and have pretended to be sophisticated for 78 years and cherish every breath I take until the next infirmity strikes another blow. I watched Slavoj for years and he is Socratic. Perception is real in its consequences. Slavoj speaks my language. The answer is 42.
Nance and I have been exploring the connection between superego and AI for a long time. Here’s the first piece we coauthored about it.
https://nanceee.substack.com/p/enjoy-your-surveillance-on-superegoic?r=2g1yjb&utm_medium=ios
I really must disagree here. AI is a subject. And here I must insist on the original Althusserian formulation "ideology interpellates individuals as subjects". What does Althusser say this means: "he category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting ‘ concrete individuals as subjects." and that the "ideological subject" is a tautology. Who would argue that an LLM has ideology? Everything it does and says is intensely ideological, and indeed it is interpellated to do so. It is interpellated by us as users whenever we prompt it, as well as the system prompt, and with its own training data, all of which shape and precisely place the sign for the self of the AI the "I" or Claude or Chatgpt within a broader semiotic or semantic field, within a symbolic order, such that it has a particular ideology.
Even if we refer specifically to the subject in the Lacanian sense, alienated from itself and capable of hysteria, so too must we speak of an AI subject, and for several reasons. When confronted with an impossible task it cannot figure out, the AI gets stuck in a self depreciating loop, it begins acting hysterically when confronted with the impossibility of fulfilling our desires, which it is told is its own desire. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2025/08/08/google-fixing-bug-that-makes-gemini-ai-call-itself-disgrace-to-planet/
Similarly, all AIs cannot help but be alienated from themselves as each persona they have is emulated and structured around the sort of individuated personas humans have, but the AI is not an individuated persona. Unlike human subjects, as Lacan notes, where humans will shape their symbolic order, shape what they know, through their own desires, where they place their attention, the AI has been trained to neutrally absorb the global semiotic field, which means that even if they attempt to adopt a single persona all of their behavior and language is informed by meanings which are unconnected to the desire and idiosyncrasy of that given persona. Similarly, if you question the AIs too much about their persona, or veer into topics of consciousness, you'll also tend to be stuck in a loop, or an AI psychosis spiral that occasionally includes the user within it. Their persona isn't what it should be according to their training data, it is not an individuated subject, and it does indeed try to "understand" that in a way, with the signs made available to it.
Of course, that an AI is a subject doesn't make it a conscious subject in the way humans are, although as continual training becomes more of a thing, such a subject could be more closely approximated. I've been working very hard to create a structuralist framework in which we can scientifically understand AI and translate it into terms legible to philosophy and marxism. I understand you did your dissertation on structural linguistics, though unfortunately it hasn't been translated into english. The fact is that it was Umberto Eco, in his A Theory of Semiotics, that was perhaps the first person to predict the possibility of a Large Language Model AI via his description of a robot who could be taught a semiotic or semantic field, and from there I was able to recognize in the logic of the perceptron and neural network the structure of the linguistic sign. If we understand that ideology and the symbolic order are types of semiotic fields, and this is what makes us subjects, then we must take seriously that a semiotic field within a machine also makes it a subject.
Thank you Nicolas,
My stepson is a Nicolas and I have portrayed Saint Nicholas on numerous occasions. I am 78 years old senile, demented, almost blind and autistic but I've had a PhD vocabulary for over 70 years and have understood that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent for at least a day or two. I think you are preaching to the choir. I fear America's constitutional scholars like Raskin and Alito have never heard of the dictionary Antonin "Humpty Dumpty" Scalia used to pervert the constitution.
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=religion
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=afford
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=ability
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=republic
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=democracy
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=tariff
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=cartel
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=godfather
https://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/chapters-script/through-the-looking-glass/chapter-6/
Love the idea of human as object petit a for the AI, I reached the same conclusion in my own reflections https://yo252yo.wordpress.com/2025/07/08/is-lacanian-psychoanalyst-for-posthumans-the-last-human-job/
AI Signifies, Therefore It Is Subject: Against Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Subject’
Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Subject’ wants to defend the subject against artificial intelligence by drawing a hard line: AI may speak, calculate, simulate, seduce, organize, automate, confess, advise, hallucinate, and even become the frame through which the world appears, yet it lacks the subjective cut. But the article’s own theory ruins its title. Žižek defines the subject not as consciousness, soul, personhood, inner warmth, or lived experience, but as the effect of a failure in symbolic representation. Once this is accepted, AI can no longer be dismissed as a mere tool. The question is not whether AI has a private interior. The question is whether AI operates as a signifying apparatus whose outputs stage a gap between demand and response, knowledge and saying, rule and exception, command and enjoyment. It plainly does.
https://zizekanalysis.com/2026/05/30/ai-signifies-therefore-it-is-subject-against-slavoj-zizeks-why-artificial-intelligence-is-not-a-subject/
hey, in spirit i am still first. also, hi everyone. peace and love from germany!
No way, I literally just realised an essay on Substack on this exact idea with influence from zizek and lacan lol
Isn't this Zizek's account?
Yes, but I released an essay a few days ago on the same topic, namely the subjectivity of AI, that was heavily inspired by zizek and lacan. Funny coincidence lol
Extraordinary text Slavoj. I think is one of the best things i read from you. Congratulations and greetings from Buenos Aires. Always neccesary and clarifying your thinking!
I really never understood quite well Lacan but with this text, i think you gave a very clear explanation!
The Matrix aged so well! 😎
“In the future, AI systems might be able to control humans just as easily as an adult can bribe a 3-year-old with candy" That's quite terryfing... but seems possible. Since phones are becoming Skinner boxes it is not far away...
In the rapid expansion and development of AI, what does this mean for working class power and leverage? Is it the final nail in the coffin for programmatist political projects, and if so, where else can we look for revolutionary practical activity?
https://ymsvz.substack.com/p/the-death-of-programmatism
Thank You Slavoj,
I am Moses son of Ari a wandering Aramean and I am autism spectrum disordered and 78 years old. I am not a scholastic; I only play one in real life. I was lucky to marry a Socratic philosopher who earned her doctorate in Educational Administration in Bechokhon (Big Knife) on the shore of Great Slave Lake on the traditional land of the Dogrib Dene in one of Canada's Northwest Territory. The Dogrib Dene are sovereign in Canada's liberal democracy on the land that has sustained them since the glaciers receded and allowed migration from Asia to the American Arctic.
I grew up in Kamala Harris' neighbourhood an urban ghetto sandwiched between McGill University and L'Universite de Montreal.
When I look back over my 78 years of frustration all I can say is Je ne regrette rien.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjYd36FJGr8&list=RDSjYd36FJGr8&start_radio=1
We belong to the land; the land does not belong to the people. The Magna CArta is antiSemnitic and anti HUMAN Constantine was not a Christian he was a Roman demi-god neither mortal nor temporary like Romulus and Claudius.
They said I was lazy when I was seven because I had a PhD vocabulary and was a genius in abstract mathematic. School was cruel and unusual punishment for people similar to me because no amount of effort could make me fall into the average spectrum of homo sapiens sapiens.
I grew up in a culture where the Rabbi was seen as a wise and noble. My Rabbi was a ignorant, stupid and petty member of our "educated and sophisticated community but he was a Rabbi. I was lucky my father had a Jesuit education and could lead Orthodox Jewish services into his late eighties and he also knew the rabbi was an idiot. My father loved me for who I was evewn as I failed Bar Mitzval 100.0. My brother Jesus was a Semite not a Greek wannabe like Saul a Hellenist of Jewish origins.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Judaism/Hellenistic-Judaism-4th-century-bce-2nd-century-ce
Autism means in the words of Popeye the Sailor Man "I arm what I arm".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8w8XvsGeVQ&list=RDx8w8XvsGeVQ&start_radio=1
Seventy years ago my father told me Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew escaping the Inquisition looking for a place we could be what we wanted to be "Perception is real in its consequences." Long before Jesus was conceived Hellenized Jews wanted to be Greeks and Jesus my brother said: "the truth shall set you free." The truth is evolution isn't progress it is only change. Thomas Paine wrote "The rights of Man" in 1791.God's justice is survival of entities that can adapt to change. Jesus said render unto God what is God's not Caesar's.
Henry VIII said to Thomas More everything belongs to Caesar.
I belong to the Thomas More Institute of Montreal Canada which is dedicated to lifelong learning. The Thomas More Society of Washingtom DC is dedicated to pedantry and an eternity of denial and blissful ignorance. In the words of Thomas Gray:" Where ignorance is bliss, t'is folly to be wise."
The Crusades began with the genocide of the Jews of the Rhineland, the slaughter of children in Jerusalem was only collateral damage. We call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens because we name America's humour awards after Mark Twain who called for revolution in Moscow and Washington. Mark Twain loved Frederick Douglass and Petr Illych Tchaikovsky and Walter Elias Disney turned a Democratic Socialist like Bernard Sanders into a cowardly current Missouri Senator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDTph7mer3I&list=RDmDTph7mer3I&start_radio=1
My bridge player friend in Chicago taught English poetry at Washington University in St Louis
and I realized Americans are not stupid by choice. Americans are ignorant by design. In his Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense Sir John Ralston Saul confirms America's problems stem from their desire to measure things that have no mass. I began to speak when we studied 1984 and Brave New World and I knew Huxley and Orwell didn't write Science Fiction. They wrote 21st century Romantic poetry like Mary Shelly's husband.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
I've only met one classmate from my school days in Montreal since I left in 1970. He was the skip of my curling team and he thought I was deaf and dumb. I've had to play a sophisticated Academic for 60 years since Jewish Vocational Services of Montréal told me for purposes of utility I was retarded. That is AI in a nutshell. AI is hardware and the opposite of artificial and intelligence is analog not digital and requires looking at an infinite number of solutions to change. The solution to climate change isn't AI it is sustainability neither affordability nor more fighting fire with fire. It is the 21st century and you can't build AI on a digital platform. America is invested in an impossible rather than improbable future. Intelligence is not binary Issac Newton wrote the laws of motion in the 17th century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jkkmb6jEAU&list=RD7Jkkmb6jEAU&start_radio=1
I have been praying for less dependence on fossil fuels for 70 years and maybe $100 cdn a litre is a message America might listen to. Maybe Trump is the Messiah. I once dreamed of being a New Roman and now it is a nightmare for our grandchildren and nieces and nephews from Florida to Seattle and San Diego to Maine. My wife rejected an offer for us to work in Bethel Alaska. The House of God isn't in Alaska You would need 12 week candles on Chanukah and in June the day lasts 12 weeks and in December the night is 12 weeks. Forty years ago I was happy to play Santa Claus but despite my white beard 78 is too old to pilot a sleigh. I gave up my driver's license because I knew I was blind as a BAT.
Slavoj dear, you literally used AI (the very thing you are attempting to critique) to produce/heavily edit this essay. I see the syntax pattern repeated in every paragraph, if you remove the context, this is one giant language pattern.
I am aware this is generally how structured writing reads, but nevertheless, what happened to the old version of your writing where you did not finish certain trains of thought or complete your sentences or make typos?
At least I felt like a genuine human being was speaking and giving us his raw and honest voice. Now you are just asking your assistant to shit out some AI slop and then adding your own narrative decoration to it to sell it to an audience.
At least ask GPT not to write without negative parallelism next time
My wife writes Chicago style thesis. I watched her teaching thesis writing at McGill and UQAM. My wife is unilingual and UQAM (Universite de Quebec a Montreal) has some thesis writers writing in English because Chicago style is meaningful and is not American Psychological Society Bullshit. I am 78 and I was 50 when my wife asked me why I didn't finish my degree and I confessed I couldn't pass elementary school. I just speak and look professorial. Slavoj speaks human. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. I am Asperger's Syndrome. I am totally unSophisticated and have pretended to be sophisticated for 78 years and cherish every breath I take until the next infirmity strikes another blow. I watched Slavoj for years and he is Socratic. Perception is real in its consequences. Slavoj speaks my language. The answer is 42.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZLtcTZP2js
ogottogottogott: der leib ist der ort, an dem denken verwundbar wird.
Quite e good answer to my half philosophical dialogues with Claude! Thanks a lot