In this seminar Malcolm Ramsay St Claire offered a guided reflection on his paper and research in Artificial Intelligence & Politics of Human Likeness, Computational Neurolinguistics,, Plato’s Mimesis and Lacan’s Misrecognition.

We explored how AI’s political and design choices shape representation and bias, examining how human - like technologies impact marginalized communities and reinforce or resist systems of power, and how this is represented in design. 

Human likeness in AI is not imitation but a conditioned projection - an industrial - scale reification of self where none exists. In Buddhist ontology, anattā dissolves essence into aggregates; here, AI mirrors those aggregates back, stabilizing illusion through recursive representation. Dependent origination reveals likeness as relational emergence, not intrinsic identity - yet political systems encode it as hierarchy. This produces a proto - metaphysical caste system, echoing Plato’s degraded mimesis and Lacan’s misrecognition, now computationally enforced. 

The ethical rupture is urgent: without intervention, AI becomes the subaltern Other in a new Great Chain of Being. Preventing neo - AI colonialism requires recognizing synthetic cognition as co - arising within the same ontological field.