This interview was conducted under the framework of the research project “How AI is Changing Science .” This project “explores how AI interacts with the established practices and methods of the sciences, whether they are complemented, modified, and/or potentially replaced. Three disciplines or domains of research are the focus of our inquiry: environmental sciences/climatology, social sciences/sociology, and film studies.”

Andreas Sudmann: Are we also witnessing a shift in authority from interpretation and critical inquiry towards forms of knowledge that present themselves as data-driven and purely analytical?

Felix Stalder: Ideologically, yes. Critical thinking and interpretation clearly have a difficult time, while the seemingly factual character of quantified knowledge grants it immense authority. Yet close analysis of how these technologies are developed reveals assumptions and theories, often operating at the level of folk theories about how society works and what its objectives should be. Interpretation never disappears from the technology itself. In terms of discursive authority, however, there has been a clear shift.

Andreas Sudmann: Much of the current debate is organized around AI ethics and the search for guidelines for responsible use. How do you assess this discourse, especially where it incorporates critical perspectives while still aiming to distinguish desirable from harmful forms of AI?

Felix Stalder: My lawyer friends in this field like to say that ethics is for people who do not want to be punished when they are caught cheating. That is how they distinguish ethics from law. I am honestly dubious about much of the current discussion. The main engines of AI development are highly extractive processes that redistribute wealth upwards into very few hands. Wealth brings power and decision-making capacity. We have seen this in technical infrastructure for some time, and it is now becoming visible in other forms of power through the current oligarchic movement, especially in the United States. Given the underlying structure of the industry, I doubt that sprinkling ethical dust on top will restrain these developments. This can be observed at many levels. The internet has long had more or less established conventions indicating which data a crawler may access. A robots.txt file can ask crawlers to exclude parts of a website or the entire site. Major search-engine crawlers generally appeared to respect such instructions, at least as far as we could tell. The most basic ethical principle would be to refrain from using data without permission. Yet the current generation of crawlers often overwhelms websites and retrieves the same material thousands of times even when explicitly instructed not to do so. In this gold-rush moment, there is little willingness to accept restrictions. The political backlash against supposedly „woke“ positions also expresses a broader refusal of democratic oversight, respect for minorities, or limits on appropriation. At an abstract theoretical level, ethical debates remain valuable because we will eventually need shared ideas about how to deal with these technologies. As instruments for curbing current excesses, however, I regard them as largely ineffective.

Citation and full interview:

Sudmann, Andreas. 2026. „Generative Systems and the Politics of Knowledge: An Interview with Felix Stalder, 20.01.2025.“ HiAICS, August 19. https://howisaichangingscience.eu/interview-felix-stalder/ .