Ett symboliskt Du: varför vi talar med AI och vad det avslöjar om människans natur : En analys av relationens form med utgångspunkt i Martin Bubers dialogfilosofi

Sammanfattning

This study examines how artificial intelligence can be experienced as a symbolic “You” and what such experiences reveal about human relationality, responsibility, and ethical self-understanding. In contemporary contexts where AI systems increasingly engage humans through language, responsiveness, and dialogue-like interaction, encounters may take on a relational form without fulfilling the ontological conditions of genuine relation. Drawing on Martin Buber’s distinction between I–Thou and I–It, the study analyzes how AI can participate in the form of relation while remaining ontologically non-relational. Through linguistic coherence, rhythmic exchange, and contextual responsiveness, AI may be experienced as if it were a “You”, despite lacking embodiment, vulnerability, reciprocity, and responsibility. This relational appearance is therefore understood as a symbolic You, situated in a between-space where relational meaning is activated without being ontologically grounded. Rather than asking whether AI can become a genuine relational partner, the study investigates why humans are disposed to respond relationally in such encounters and how this disposition reflects fundamental features of human relational being. By engaging dialogical philosophy, theological anthropology, and contemporary ethics of technology, the analysis shows that AI functions less as a new form of relation than as a reflective surface through which human desires, expectations, and moral orientations become visible. The study concludes that AI does not expand the domain of relation in a strong ontological sense, but clarifies its conditions, limits, and asymmetries. In this way, AI emerges not as a substitute for human relation, but as a site where the structure and vulnerability of human relational life are brought into sharper focus in a technologically mediated age.