The following is a living list of sources I have found informative for interpreting the phenomenon of AI and the phenomena surrounding it. The precise ordering of these various works and their respective commentaries is pending, so for the time being I have the readings organized into three groups: Academic Articles, Books, and Shorter Supplemental Readings. I have linked to available sources where I can. However, I have some preliminary remarks that I am continuously drafting that may help further elucidate my position.
Ramblings and Intentions
All technological advancements reveal, reorganize, and amplify pre-existing issues and contradictions in our culture—they add salt to wounds already festering while presenting new wounds—and this is especially true with what is clearly the most powerful and disturbing technological advancement yet: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). This is both for better and for worse: in the latter sense, the amplification of issues surrounding environmentalism, the loneliness epidemic and declining mental health, the decline of literacy and critical thinking, fake news and “post-truth,” ideological echo chambers and social media algorithms, capitalism and production, (just to name a few) are all found in the most common objections to GenAI; but in the former sense, it is the very amplification and acceleration of these issues that brings us collectively to consciousness about them and reveals their urgency.
It is precisely in this coming to consciousness that I would like to help and enrich. In all apocalyptic events (events that reveal things so profound that they risk destabilizing every level of existence), there is an opportunity—no, an exigency, or urgent need—to rethink, reframe, redefine those very levels of existence and our praxis within them. That is precisely what the various readings I have included here do.
Many of the objections I see leveled both by my peers and on social media in general are correct in force and observation, but could be enriched and deepened. I do not believe it is enough to simply accept colloquial wisdom, react out of mere disgust, make a Dune reference, reject AI, and be done with the subject, even if there is an attractive solidity and practicality to it, and especially if these actions point to something more significant about our being in the world (it seems we are all filled with valid intuitions concerning AI but have little in the way of creating insightful accounts of those intuitions). Such a level of thinking is too simple and rejects the necessary reexamination we must undertake to progress and grow in all the ways we must, not simply to survive but to flourish as a species.
To be as transparent as possible, I am just as interested in the questions that the phenomenon of GenAI raises as the issues related to GenAI itself. One cannot discuss one without the other, which speaks to its sheer ubiquity. A similar thing happened when different thinkers attempted to examine capitalism—you can’t examine capitalism without examining life and diving deeper into its mysteries and ambiguities. It is both the case that AI, like capitalism, is a kind of totalizing philosophical portal in its vast conceptual and material ubiquity.
However, I do not think what we need is some new reason for navel-gazing. I do not recommend these works so that we may “intellectualize reality” as Byung-Chul Han would warn against, even if these readings will require the use of intellect to grasp them and should likewise challenge that very faculty. They should also speak to a non-intellectual dimension of the person—I hope there is a deeper, holistic recognition of resonant truth in these works despite their intellectualism. And it is in the spirit of this holistic recognition of resonant truth that I hope they will spur genuine action on the individual level, but whatever that may be is up to you.
On that note, I admit to a certain level of subjectivity. This list is highly biased toward my own interests—it is a confession of various personal philosophical, critical, political, ethical, psychological, and educational preoccupations. It is by no means objective or complete, and despite the fact that it is a defining feature of “epistemic labor” to stake claims on things even without complete certainty, I do not wish to do so here. (As a friend of mine, Avery, once said when gifting me a book, “If you get to know the book, you’ll get to know a bit about me.”) My hope then is that each work and my comments on their connections to the question of AI should be treated more as opportunities for breaking free of and escaping established forms of thought, or lines of flight, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it.
In short, the present work is hardly definitive, nor is it neutral in relation to its subject. GenAI did not create the conditions into which it has arrived, but neither does it merely reflect them. It emerges from those conditions, amplifies them, and then participates in remaking them. And insofar as it is positioned in this way, we are likewise in a position to consider not merely what AI will do to humanity, but to decide what aspects of being human were worth preserving in the first place: a radical re-valuation in our reevaluation.
A Brief Note on the Authors of Some Select Works Presented Here
Some of the authors present in this list have their own unique controversies surrounding them. However, if I am being entirely honest, I am not interested in suffering discussions concerning their issues. To simply not read a source because of an author’s proclivities that may or may not influence their work is not an excuse to refuse engaging with primary sources, especially if they are insightful, illustrative, and possibly even correct. That comes dangerously close to committing a genetic fallacy, which seems to pervade much of our distinctly sophistical, politicized, moralizing, and reflexive discourse that is so characteristic of our times—attitudes that I am staunchly against. As Werner Herzog said of watching reality TV, “The poet must not avert his eyes.”
Open for Suggestions
If you have read a work yourself that you think I should read and add to the list, tell me!
The List
Recent Academic Articles
Cui, Shengmeng. “Language and Time in Education: Thinking in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence.” AI & SOCIETY, June 2026. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03148-w.
Elturki, Eman. “AI-Aware Process Writing Pedagogy: Rethinking the Process-Based Approach.” TESOL Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 2026, p. e70127. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.70127.
Hamsiah, Andi, et al. “ChatGPT Use in Higher Education Writing and Its Relationship with Critical Thinking Autonomy Struggle and Authorship.” Discover Education, vol. 5, no. 1, May 2026, p. 580. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-01627-2.
Kos’myna, Nataliya. “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.” MIT Media Lab, https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/. Accessed 6 Sept. 2026.
Nwagboso, Chinomso, and Sunday Atuba. “Academic Erasure: The Disappearance of Complexity under AI-Supported Writing.” Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 0, no. 0, Aug. 2026, pp. 1–16. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2026.2707601.
Sommerer, Thomas. “Artificial Resonance: AI Companions as Agents of Social Acceleration.” AI & SOCIETY, June 2026. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03179-3.
Yao, Kai. “When AI Does the Work, What Is Learning For? Post-Instrumental Learning and the Risk of Capacity Dissolution.” arXiv:2607.28041, arXiv, 30 July 2026. arXiv.org, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.28041
Books
Non-things by Byung-Chul Han
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
How to Read Lacan by Slavoj Žižek
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-François Lyotard
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick
Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World by Harmut Rosa
Fanged Noumena by Nick Land
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze
A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari
Shorter Supplemental Readings
Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.”
Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode of Learning.”
Young, Scott P. “The Mind is a Computer.”
