How Artificial Intelligence Shapes Who We Become

Meike’s Reflections on Artificial Intelligence

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How Artificial Intelligence Shapes Who We Become

Meike’s Reflections on Artificial Intelligence

This is the forth part of MDI’s leadership architect Meike Hinnenberg’s new blog reflection series on AI. You can find the previous parts on our blog site! Stay tuned for more 🙂

How Artificial Intelligence Shapes Who We Become | Lines of Subjectivation

Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are in this very moment. (Michel Foucault: The Subject and Power) The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are undistinguishable from it. (Marc Weiser: The computer for the 21st Century)

The Hidden Labor Behind AI – A Berlin Exhibition

May 2026 in Berlin; spring has arrived. Light enters the room, and a quiet warmth settles in the apartment. The window is slightly open. I sit at the same table. Again, coffee – dark, dense, almost earthy in its intensity – fills the room.

While I follow its taste, while I continue working on this text, fragments of the exhibition The Language of Soil, which I visited earlier today, return. In this installation, the artist Anna Ehrenstein directs attention to platform workers in Nairobi, Congo, and Egypt – workers who sustain what is called Artificial Intelligence, and for whom Jeff Bezos once used the phrase “artificial artificial intelligence.”

Employed by outsourcing partners of Big Tech companies, their work remains largely unseen. The exhibition brings together interviews, workshops, and collective narrative formats in a 220° video installation, rendering perceptible the “interplay of (post-)colonial continuities, global economies, and the labor that underpins algorithmic systems“.

Voices from the Invisible Infrastructure

I am watching. I am listening. A father, closely connected to his family, now estranged from his daughter; her presence recalls the CSAM he is required to review and label each day. A woman working as a content moderator, checking and filtering visual material from an armed conflict that has also affected her own family, from whom she has had no sign of life. Syrian refugees, shaped by war, displacement, and flight, now labeling sequences of images – war, torture, suicide, rape, child abuse – images that do not remain external, but return.

Micro-Tasks, Micro-Pay

Payment is calculated per micro-task. Ten, twenty, twenty-five cents. Sometimes less. It accumulates slowly, often to less than two dollars per hour. Contracts remain short. They are extended or they are not. Refusal is possible, but not without consequence. Continuity depends on compliance. The work moves; the workers remain replaceable.

Where Do I Stand in This Formation?

As I follow this movement of memories, questions begin to insist: Where am I located in the formation I am trying to describe? How am I affected by it? How do I relate to it?

Has something like an exterior position been gained through thinking the dispositif of Artificial Intelligence, through its lines of visibility and enunciation? Is this now a stable place from which I can speak with a certain autonomy, perhaps even judge it? Or is this, too, only a movement within the same singular and historically situated configuration?

The Illusion of the Exterior Subject

It would be tempting to assume that what has come into view simply persists as knowledge at my disposal, while I myself remain unaffected. Such a perspective preserves the familiar figure of an exterior, self-assured subject and a stable reality upon which it acts by means of technology. And yet this assumption falters. If Artificial Intelligence is approached not merely as a set of tools but as a condition of world-disclosure, the situation becomes more complex.

If the preceding analysis marks a shift in the conditions of seeing and saying, if what appeared self-evident is shown to depend on structured exclusions, then this shift cannot be limited to the object. It implicates the position of the one who sees and speaks, and with it the conditions under which others remain unseen and unheard. What comes into view does not simply add itself to knowledge; it alters the field in which both subject and world take shape.

Foucault and the Making of Subjects

The man described […], whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself.

Michel Foucault’s understood his own work as an attempt “to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” (Michel Foucault: Subject and Power) We are not subjects prior to these processes. We are born into historically specific arrangements, dispositifs, within which we speak and are spoken about, see and are seen, act and are acted upon. Even if this idea is an affront to one’s ego, subjectivity does not precede these relations; it takes shape within them. Or, in a Deleuzian inflection: we are continually in processes of becoming-subject.

Lines of Visibility: Who Gets to Appear

If lines of visibility are conditions of perception – if they determine what can appear, in what form, and from which position – then they do not merely organize objects. They also distribute subjects: they situate them, relate them to one another, and define the positions from which something like a “self” can emerge within a given regime of visibility.

Lines of Enunciation: Who Gets to Speak

If lines of enunciation are conditions of sayability – if they determine who or what can speak, where agency is grammatically and conceptually placed, what can be said and in what form it becomes meaningful – then they also affect the subject. For those who speak are not exterior to these conditions.

They take shape within them. What can be articulated, and from which position it can appear as intelligible, does not simply structure discourse; it structures the one who speaks. Subjectivity emerges here not as origin, but as effect: as something formed within a field of available statements, distinctions, and attributions of agency.

To speak is therefore not only to express oneself, but to enter a space already organized in advance, to adopt positions, to repeat or displace existing formulations, to inhabit or refuse a grammar that distributes agency and responsibility. What appears as a self speaking is inseparable from the conditions of enunciation through which it becomes legible, both to others and to itself.

Lines of Subjectivation in the Dispositif of Artificial Intelligence

In a Deleuzian sense, lines of subjectivation do not designate identities or inner states. They are trajectories through which subjects are produced: ways in which beings are called into relation with themselves, assigned positions of responsibility, and made capable or incapable of acting, speaking or refusing. They are neither purely imposed nor freely chosen, but emerge in the interplay of practices, norms, and material arrangements.

Within the dispositif of Artificial Intelligence, such lines are not peripheral; they are constitutive of its operation. They do not merely run alongside technical systems but traverse them, linking infrastructures of computation with everyday forms of self-relation.

We are simultaneously involved in their production and their effects: by generating data, labeling and rating outputs, prompting and correcting systems, but also by adopting Artificial Intelligence as interface, infrastructure and environment. At the same time, we are produced through these same relations and practices – as users, data subjects, workers, experts, and objects of prediction.

The Figure of the User

One dominant line of subjectivation produces the figure of the user. Here, the subject is addressed as an interacting point within a system, defined through traces of behavior and patterns of response. Agency is not denied but redirected: it appears as choice within pre-structured environments, as optimization within given parameters. The subject becomes legible insofar as it is continuously translated into data, and governable insofar as it can be rendered comparable, measurable and adjustable.

The Subject as Data

A further line produces the subject as data itself. In this configuration, life is not primarily addressed as expression but as extractable material. Actions, preferences, and linguistic traces are transformed into features, categories, and probabilities. Subjectivity no longer precedes this process; it is retroactively assembled through classification. What one is becomes inseparable from what one can be made to count as.

The Invisible Worker

Another line concerns labor. Here, subjects appear as infrastructural operators of AI systems: annotators, moderators, raters, validators. Their work is essential yet structurally displaced from visibility. It appears only in functional form, as “human-in-the-loop,” as quality control, as correction, while the conditions of its production remain largely unacknowledged. Subjectivation takes the form of simultaneous centrality and erasure.

The Subject of Expertise

A further line produces subjects of expertise. Engineers, researchers, and ethicists are positioned as rational stewards of complex systems. Responsibility is localized at the level of technical decision-making, while broader political and economic structures recede into the background. In this way, agency is reorganized as competence, and critique is often translated into questions of design, optimization, or governance.

The Predictive Subject

Finally, a predictive line of subjectivation renders individuals as anticipatable entities. In domains such as policing, border regimes, or welfare systems, subjects appear as risks, scores, or probabilities. They are addressed not primarily in relation to what they do, but in relation to what they are expected to do. In this configuration, subjectivation operates in advance of action: it produces subjects through the pre-structuring of possible futures.

Alternative Practices: What the Dispositif Cannot Fully Capture

However, not all lines of subjectivation find equal conditions of existence within the dispositif of Artificial Intelligence. Alongside those described above that are actively produced and stabilized, there are others that remain structurally disfavored, forms of becoming-subject that do not easily enter regimes of datafication, optimization, or classification. These are not external to the field, but they appear as weak intensities within it, continually at risk of being neutralized or translated into more legible forms.

If lines of subjectivation traverse the dispositif in this way – if they produce us even as we reproduce them – then the question cannot be limited to which subjects are made possible, but must also address which remain difficult to sustain, and how this difference is lived. If they emerge in the interplay of practices, norms, and material arrangements, a further question arises: what other forms of becoming-subject might be opened through different practices? And which forms of self-relation do we, in turn, sustain or reinforce?

Writing: From Struggle with Meaning to Selection Among Outputs

What is the difference between writing a text in the slow proximity of one’s own words – hesitating, revising, following a thought that resists formulation – and producing a text through a system that calculates probable continuations? What shifts in the relation to language, if expression no longer emerges from a struggle with meaning, but from selection among pre-structured possibilities? What kind of subject takes shape when writing becomes prompting, when articulation becomes navigation within a space of outputs already statistically composed?

What becomes of thought when it is no longer allowed to remain without immediate result? What changes if attention is not held in suspension – wandering, returning, lingering – but is continuously operationalized as input, as signal, as resource? What kind of self is formed when thinking is oriented towards an immediate answer, rather than toward the possibility of not yet knowing what it is that one thinks?

What happens to relation when conversation is displaced by mediation? When the effort to encounter another – through hesitation, misunderstanding, goodwill, care, kindness – is replaced by a system that purportedly anticipates, summarizes, or simulates response? What is lost when affect appears as something that can be retrieved on demand, rather than something that emerges in the unpredictability of presence?

What becomes perceptible when an artwork interrupts the smooth passage from image to category? When what is seen does not immediately resolve into recognition, but remains suspended – irreducible to function, resistant to immediate use? What kind of subject emerges in such a moment, in which perception is not yet captured by classification, and meaning does not stabilize into a single trajectory?

And what shifts when the figure of the “annotator” ceases to appear as function and becomes encounter? When the one who labels, filters, and corrects is no longer integrated as an invisible component of the system, but appears as a situated other, whose experience cannot be exhausted by the categories that depend on it and who makes a claim on us? What becomes unstable when this presence can no longer be fully translated into data, role, or task?

Points of Non-Coincidence: Where Other Trajectories Begin

These questions do not lead outside the dispositif. They do not restore an untouched subject prior to its formation. But they begin to indicate points at which its operations do not fully close, and thus sites at which what Waldenfels calls Antwortlichkeit becomes possible. For in each case, something remains that does not coincide with its capture: a hesitation in language, a surplus in perception, a resistance in relation, a remainder in the other that exceeds the roles through which they are made intelligible.

It is perhaps here – not beyond, but within these moments of non-coincidence – that other trajectories of subjectivation become thinkable. Not as stable alternatives, but as fragile deviations: ways of speaking, seeing, and relating that do not entirely align with the imperatives of calculation, prediction, and optimization, and that, precisely in this misalignment, keep the field from becoming fully closed and protect us from totalization.

Which Forms of Life Do We Sustain?

What these movements begin to make visible is a relation that resists simplification. We are not external to the dispositif we describe. We do not stand before it as sovereign subjects, capable of steering it from a position of independence. We are formed within it – through its lines of visibility, its regimes of enunciation, its processes of subjectivation. What we can see, what we can say, what we can become is never simply our own.

And yet, this does not exhaust the relation. For if we are shaped within these configurations, we are not only their effect. We participate in their continuation. We stabilize them through our practices, our repetitions, our forms of use. But precisely in this, a different possibility emerges: that what is reproduced can also be shifted. That even within the field that forms us, there are movements – hesitations, deviations, reconfigurations – through which other trajectories of subjectivation can be fostered.

Neither Determined Nor Free: A More Demanding Question

The question, then, is not whether we are determined or free. It is more demanding: which forms of life do we sustain through the ways we see, speak, and relate? Which subjects do we become when we align ourselves seamlessly with these systems – when we allow their operations to pass through us without resistance, when we accept their abstractions as sufficient descriptions of ourselves and others? And what becomes unavailable in this alignment: which forms of attention, of relation, of language, of responsibility begin to recede when they are no longer practiced?

Conversely, what might it mean to remain within these formations without fully coinciding with them? To inhabit their structures, but not to let them settle entirely into what we take ourselves to be? If there is no outside from which to act, then intervention must take place within the very relations that bind us – within the practices through which subjectivity is continuously produced and reproduced.

Toward the Distribution of Forces

It is here that another dimension comes into view. For the dispositif does not only organize what can be seen, said, and become; it also distributes forces. It channels, intensifies, and stabilizes them. It produces asymmetries, accumulations, and thresholds. To understand how these movements hold, how they persist, and how they might be altered, it becomes necessary to follow not only lines of visibility, enunciation, and subjectivation, but also the lines along which forces are arranged, transmitted, and transformed.