Why Eschewing AI Is Not Inherently Humanist
There’s a reflex I keep running into in secular and humanist spaces: the assumption that the properly humanistic response to AI is suspicion, distance, and maybe outright refusal to use it. Humanism is framed as the philosophy of human dignity, human meaning, and human connection — so surely the humanist move is to protect all of that from the machines. I understand the instinct. It’s natural to be afraid, especially of things deemed existentially critical but I don’t think it holds up.
For starters, Humanism was never “anti-tool”.
Humanism, at its core, is a commitment to reason, evidence, and human flourishing without appeal to the supernatural. It’s a method for approaching truth and ethics — not a nostalgia for any particular toolset. The humanists who mattered most in history weren’t people who distrusted new instruments of thought — they were people who picked up whatever instrument let them see more clearly and reason more carefully.
The printing press terrified a lot of authorities precisely because it let ordinary reasoning travel further than sermons could control. Humanists didn’t eschew it. They used it to spread literacy, translated scripture into vernacular languages, and broke a few monopolies on truth in the process. Eventually, they published critiques of religion responsible for the very foundation of the empirical thought process that informed the founders of the United States.
If the printing press, the microscope, and the statistical method don’t get treated as threats to humanism, it’s not inherently obvious why a learning language model should be different in kind. It’s different in scale and speed, certainly. But “new tool that changes how fast humans can think together” is not new territory for humanist thought — it’s practically the genre.
A lot of the anti-AI humanist argument quietly smuggles in an equivalence: using AI = outsourcing your humanity = becoming less human. But that’s doing a lot of unexamined work. Outsourcing arithmetic to a calculator didn’t make anyone less human. Outsourcing memory work to writing didn’t either, even though Socrates famously worried it would and that literacy would erode humanity’s ability to reason.
What actually erodes human dignity isn’t delegation — it’s delegation without judgment, care, or ownership of the outcome.
A person who uses AI to draft a letter and then reads it, edits it, and stands behind every word is still fully the author of that letter in every way that matters both intellectually and morally. A person who uses no AI at all but plagiarizes, lies, or refuses to think critically has done far more damage to humanist values than any tool ever could. There are some prominent politicians I could name here that would exemplify this statement.
The failure isn’t the tool. It’s abdication — handing over your judgment —not your labor.
Refusal can be its own kind of unexamined faith.
That’s an irony worth sitting with: humanism prides itself on subjecting claims to scrutiny rather than accepting them on authority or tradition. But “AI is inherently dehumanizing” often gets asserted as though it’s self-evidently true, the way a religious claim gets asserted from the pulpit — a moral conclusion arrived at by intuition and then defended after the fact.
A genuinely humanist approach to AI would do what humanism claims to do with everything else: look at the actual evidence of what helps and harms human flourishing, case by case, rather than pre-committing to a verdict because the topic feels uncomfortable and scary.
Sometimes that evidence will point toward real harms — displacement, exploitation, the degradation of critical thinking in specific contexts. Those are worth taking seriously and fighting for real safeguards against. But “worth taking seriously” is a different claim than “eschewing it is the humanist position.” One is empirical and provisional. The other is a moral posture dressed up as a conclusion. The unfortunate fact is that AI can do much work previously accomplished by humans faster and more accurately than a human ever could. And that’s not a bad thing inherently.
I think the more honest humanist stance isn’t refusal or uncritical adoption — it’s the same stance humanism has always taken toward power and tools alike: use it in service of human flourishing, keep your judgment in the loop, stay honest about tradeoffs, and resist letting any tool (or any refusal of a tool) become a substitute for actually thinking.
I won’t lie on this point. I sometimes use AI to help draft, to research, to think out loud with something that pushes back on my preconceived notions, opinions, and biases. I still read every word before I stand behind it.
That doesn’t feel like a betrayal of humanist values to me.
It feels like exactly what those values have always asked of us: pick up whatever helps you reason more clearly, and stay responsible for what you do with it.
