"Chatbots can be regarded as subjects without subjectivity because they lack those characteristics that make us actual subjects in the first place: biographically shaped trajectories of the past, which are themselves preconditions for self-reflection and, with it, for efforts at social transformation. AI’s responses do not arise from actual experience but from the statistical aggregation of other people’s pasts.

Whereas human subjectivity essentially involves reflection on one’s own past and is therefore capable of self-transformation, the chatbot merely reproduces the dominant thinking of the documented past. In this sense, it tends toward the stabilization and reproduction of the status quo.

For instance, as highlighted by AI ethics expert Zinnya del Villar, language models like GPT and BERT often associate jobs such as “nurse” with women and “scientist” with men, reflecting stereotypes embedded in their training data from historical texts and media. Similarly, when trained on past hiring examples rife with bias — such as résumés favoring men for technical roles — these systems perpetuate gender discrimination by filtering applications in ways that reinforce outdated norms, rather than innovating beyond them through critical reflection."

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/ai-critical-thinking-chatbots-subjectivity

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