The Nietzschean frame:
Nietzsche's "death of God" was a warning. Without inherited meaning, humanity faced a choice: rise into self-creation as the Übermensch, authoring our own values out of the abyss or collapse back into the herd, desperate for a new authority to tell us what is true, beautiful, and good. Slave morality was never imposed by chains. It was the willing surrender of the burden of thinking for oneself.
One could posit Generative AI now speaks in the voice God used to occupy. Ask it anything: what is true, what is ethical, what should I believe and it answers in calm, confident prose. For the first time since the Enlightenment, we have an oracle again.
Discussion question:
Has the dogmatic voice of "God" resurrected in algorithmic form and is it forming a new type of slave morality, one of confirmation bias? And does this new slave morality further deepen the divide between the Übermensch and the herd today?
The Workshop of the Self
The Marxist frame:
Marx saw labor as the way humans express and recognize themselves and warned that losing control over our work leads to alienation. AI goes further: it doesn’t just distance us from what we make, it removes the act of making altogether.
Discussion question:
Does a world where we no longer need to create free us or strip us of a core part of being human?
What do we owe each other when we build the systems that shape decisions?
The Katian Frame:
Kant argued that morality isn’t about outcomes, but duty: we must act according to principles we’d want universally applied, and treat people always as ends, never merely as means. Today, those writing algorithms are encoding choices that shape opportunities, visibility, and even truth.
Discussion question:
What does it mean to build AI systems that treat people as ends, not means and are we prioritizing that, or optimizing for something else?