Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence

Article reception and suspected LLM authorship

• Many commenters find the piece shallow, generic, and indistinguishable from “LLM slop”: broad claims, vague imperatives, and little concrete argument.
• Multiple citation errors are noted (misaligned footnotes, references not supporting the claims), reinforcing suspicion of automated drafting or very careless scholarship.
• Some are disturbed that this appears under the ACM banner, though it’s later clarified it is a blog post, not an edited magazine article. Suggestions are made to bring in professional philosophers as guest authors.
• A minority argue the specific authorship matters less than the fact that such low-depth, hypey material is being platformed.

Nietzsche’s philosophy vs the article’s framing

• Several argue the article misunderstands Nietzsche, using him as a brand to back familiar concerns about democratic oversight, social cohesion, or “creating value,” which sit uneasily with his anti-democratic, aristocratic, and genealogical approach to morality.
• The piece is criticized for forcing parallels between AI-mediated decisions and Nietzsche’s “death of God” without engaging central themes like master/slave morality, the Übermensch, or the “Last Man.”
• Others try to reconstruct a more serious Nietzsche–AI link: self-authored values after collapse of external meaning, will to power as a model for autonomous AI drives, or AI as part of a longer trajectory of technology unsettling moral orders.

Philosophy, nihilism, and technology more broadly

• Commenters recommend alternative starting points for technologists: Gertz’s Nihilism and Technology, Ellul’s The Technological Society, Heidegger, Deleuze & Guattari.
• Debate over nihilism:
  • One side sees it as freeing—no inherent meaning means we can construct our own, incrementally, through small improvements and helping others.
  • Another stresses that full-blown nihilism undercuts any moral grounding, treating altruistic and sadistic impulses as equally ungrounded.
• There’s wider worry about the vacuum left by collapsing religious or traditional frameworks and how it can be exploited by power-seekers or technocrats.

AI, work, and human value

• Some tie Nietzsche only loosely to AI, but think the real question is what happens as jobs lose centrality: either societies decouple human worth from economic output, or people’s “value” risks approaching zero.

Meta: LLMs and discourse

• The thread itself becomes a case study in LLM-era suspicion: readers now rapidly reject anything that feels formulaic, and even well-written comments are sometimes accused of being AI-generated.