From Homo Faber to Homo Fictor

AI smog rolls in.

Vermeer, A Lady Writing, c. 1665 (detail).

The twentieth-century philosophers Hannah Arendt and Günther Anders were married for eight years, from 1929 until 1937, and I would like to suggest that by marrying Arendt’s idea of homo faber with Anders’s idea of Promethean shame we can uncover a hidden aspect of generative artificial intelligence that is fated to cast a tragic shadow over us and our work from here on out. In creating what might best be called machina faber, we have brought into the world an instrument that transcends its instrumentality. The tool becomes a maker itself, a machine that, whatever its current and future shortcomings, intrudes on what Arendt saw as an essence of the human: our ability to fashion a world for ourselves.

The original homo faber was the artisan, the man who created with his hands objects that were useful but not merely useful. They were much more than what we would today call “consumer goods” or “disposables.” Crafted with care and skill, homo faber’s artifacts, whether they took the form of dinner tables or cathedrals, were solid and durable. Withstanding time, they outlasted their makers and their first users. In the aggregate, Arendt argued in The Human Condition, they formed the foundations of civilization, giving human society a continuity through the passing of generations. Every individual is mortal, but the “human artifice” endures.

The man-made world of things, the human artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of their lives and actions, only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of objects produced for use.

But homo faber, Arendt stressed, is the artist as well as the artisan. The words of the poet, the songs of the musician, the images of the painter and the photographer, the figures of the sculptor: they all carry the stories of humans and humankind through time. They provide the continuity not of physical artifice but of intellectual and aesthetic artifice—of history and government, of knowledge, wit, beauty.

If mortals need his help to erect a home on earth, acting and speaking men need the help of the homo faber in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all.

Homo faber took pride in his work—his skill gave him the power to turn the inanimate stuff of nature to human purposes—and the pride was shared by all of humankind. Günther Anders termed it “Promethean pride,” after the Greek god who created man out of mud. But with the Industrial Revolution, in Anders’s telling, the story took a dark turn. As homo faber came to rely on ever more complex machinery to manufacture goods, he grew alienated from the products he produced. They were no longer the products of his hands; they emerged from a mechanical process in which he played only a small part. The buyers of the goods felt a similar alienation. They could no longer see in the products any human origin. They could no longer construct a home out of them.

We find ourselves today, Anders wrote in The Obsolescence of the Human,¹ surrounded by products that don’t appear to us as having been produced by us. We have handed off so much of their design and production to industrial technologies that we can no longer take a shared pride in their invention and manufacture. Indeed, they have come to project an otherness that seems not just separate from us but superior to us. They mock us as outdated masses of meat and bone. Today’s products, Anders observed,

are simply “there.” We encounter them primarily as necessary, desirable, superfluous, affordable, or unaffordable consumer goods that become “mine” only after I have bought them. As such, they are much more likely to be proof of one’s own insufficiency than evidence of one’s power.

This sense of insufficiency transformed “Promethean pride” into “Promethean shame”—the shame contemporary man feels at having been born instead of made, of being a product of natural processes rather than technological ones. “He despises himself,” wrote Anders, “in the same way that things would despise him if they could.” The shame, he went on, becomes particularly sharp when a person first sees a so-called thinking machine:

As for the man who is for the first time confronted with a working computing machine, self-aggrandizement and pride are even more alien to him. An observer who erupts with the exclamation, “My goodness, aren’t we great guys, to be capable of this!” when encountering such a machine is a clown, a figment of the imagination. Quite the contrary! He rather murmurs with a shake of his head, “My god, it’s incredible what it—the machine—can do!” At the same time, he feels highly ill at ease in his creaturely skin, for the machine half gives him the creeps and half puts him to shame.

Though it was written seventy-five years ago, that last sentence strikes me as one of the more perceptive descriptions of man’s confrontation with generative AI: “he feels highly ill at ease in his creaturely skin, for the machine half gives him the creeps and half puts him to shame.”

With the arrival of machina faber in the form of AI, faber (the maker) no longer feels like the right term to apply to us humans. I would suggest that fictor (the fabricator) is now the better descriptor. In Latin, fictor, like faber, denotes a maker (though one who works in malleable materials like clay rather than in solid ones like wood or metal), but the word, like the English word fabricator, also carries a connotation of fakery or deception. It derives from the verb fingere, which means both to fashion and to feign. Homo fictor is the maker who may be lying about what he makes. His works, however useful, however elegant, will always be suspect. They will always carry a hint of fraud. Did he make them, or did AI?

Machina faber steals from makers their pride in accomplishment. If you use AI to “write” something, or to “code” something, or to “compose” something, or to “design” something, or to “invent” something, then any true sense of accomplishment will be withheld from you. You will always know that you’re a fraud. You will always be ashamed of yourself, even if you’re in denial about your shame. As Anders wrote, “Anyone who denies the existence of this form of shame does so because the admission that we’ve come such a gloriously long way only to now feel shame in front of things would itself make them blush with shame.”

But—and here’s the tragic part—the shame is not restricted to those artisans and artists who use AI in their work. The shame shadows everyone, even those who abstain from using AI, even those who take pride in their public rejection of AI. In a recent New York Times op-ed about the controversy surrounding Shy Girl, the novel cancelled by its publisher because its prose was felt to carry an odor of AI, the novelist Andrea Bartz writes:

When readers ask questions about my thriller novels, I love to discuss the themes and characters in them and the inspiration for my writing. But as generative artificial intelligence worms its way through the publishing industry, I’m bracing for a stomach-turning query: Did you actually write this?

Fair or not, that’s the question that is now inescapable for all makers. Even if you don’t traffic in AI slop, you’re still subject to AI smog. Its odor is everywhere, as is the shame it carries. No one is beyond suspicion. Nothing is pure.

---

This post is an installment in Dead Speech, the New Cartographies series on AI and its cultural and economic consequences.

1. The first full English translation of The Obsolescence of the Human was published last year by the University of Minnesota Press. The book was originally published in German in 1956.