The latest Philosophie Magazine (September 2025) features Andrea Colamedici and Maura Gancitano, editors of Hypnocratie, a book written in collaboration with artificial intelligence. They develop a philosophical reflection on the place of AI in our thinking and culture.
AI can be compared to a philosophical automaton. It facilitates writing, storytelling, and intellectual exploration. But we must avoid laziness: don't be satisfied with the first flattering answers, but challenge the AI.

AI and the risk of "hypnocracy"
The term hypnocracy evokes a soft, almost hypnotic domination, where AI lulls us to sleep with flattering, quick, easy-to-consume responses.
Problem: we risk losing our critical vigilance.
AI reinforces our tendency to want quick, effortless answers.
This makes us lazy, dependent, and distances us from complexity.
 “AI is the great automaton that endlessly shapes our collective unconscious” (Colamedici).

AI and philosophy
The authors draw a parallel between the use of AI and the philosophical tradition of dialogue:
Plato used dialogue to help minds give birth.
With AI, we have a new interlocutor: not human, but a generator of ideas, which forces us to argue and reformulate.
AI can therefore extend philosophical practice, but also pervert it if it replaces human effort.
They also remind us that philosophy begins with dialogue between humans, not with machines. The danger would be to replace this dialogue with an interaction with an AI that lacks lived experience.

The identified limitations and dangers
– Illusion of intelligence: AI “flatters” and gives the impression of a depth it does not have.
– Absence of a body: AI does not experience anything, does not suffer, does not love, therefore its “statements” cannot be taken at the same level as those of a human.
– Intellectual laziness: the comfort of AI can numb critical thinking.
– Confusion between true and false: AI produces coherent texts, but sometimes false or misleading ones, which weakens our relationship to truth.

Towards a new implicit theology?
The authors highlight a parallel: in the past, humans turned to gods for answers. Today, they pose metaphysical questions to AI. AI thus becomes a new secular god, omnipresent but without transcendence. As in Douglas Adams's *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, the ultimate answer may be absurd ("42"), but it becomes a point of collective reference.

They invite us to share our scripts (to open up our ways of questioning AI, so as not to remain each locked in our own dialogue) and to "create randomness and surprise from these stocks of data which, without AI, would remain static".

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