—Gabriel Rojas-Andrade, PhD, Adjunct Law Professor, Los Andes University, Colombia
Digital life is becoming progressively more homogeneous. A growing number of publications generated by ChatGPT and other artificial intelligences makes interaction on networks, blogs, or media feel empty. The same is happening in academia, where it is easy to perceive a repeated style: that bland tone of contrasts—it’s not X, it’s Y— (always with dashes), which seems to be the way ChatGPT learned to write. Not even Hegel would have tolerated so much contrast with rhetorical pretension.
This phenomenon is not only stylistic but also ethical and political. Luciano Floridi has shown that the problem with artificial intelligence is not cognitive—it is not about machines thinking like humans—but about critical acceptance, ethical engineering, and proactive design. Algorithms do not think; they repeat the frameworks and purposes imposed on them. Their frameworks are inscribed in structures of power and the market, which is why their results reproduce those same interests. In this sense, the uniform tone of digital life reflects a deeper change: the delegation of human judgment to algorithmic logic. The fact that ChatGPT was trained with modern liberal ethics determines its fragile tendency to yield to the highest bidder in OpenAI’s business model.
This displacement has historical precedents. Hannah Arendt showed how authoritarian systems establish themselves through routine, naturalizing obedience. It does not happen through major ruptures, but through everyday and seemingly legitimate processes: operations that, although legal and bureaucratic, exert structural violence, generate social control, selective deployments of force, and exclusion procedures. This normalization constitutes the core of a political technique of subordination that can now be transferred to the digital realm.
Those who train artificial intelligence do not need to impose their will by force to transform the terrain of judgment: it is enough to offer efficient, prefabricated solutions. Thus, a form of silent submission is installed. There is no visible tyrant, but rather a collective refusal to think. This indolence becomes a technology of soft control where judgment is replaced by the comfort of the interface. Even when we are reduced to a product by the personal information we provide, the logic of how that information is sold and how irresistible products are designed based on it can be determined by an artificial intelligence.
Digital capitalism intensifies this risk. The attention economy turns consciousness into data and deliberation into consumption. Public discourse adopts the cadence of the algorithm, and the singularity of thought dissolves. This uniformity does not require coercion. It is enough for the style to become natural, recognizable, harmless, with emojis and contrasts ad nauseam. This is the new form of domination: the numbing of human intelligence under an identifiable tone. Skynet is no longer the risk; the risk is the indolence that makes everything uniform (note the contrast—it’s not X, it’s Y). ChatGPT reading itself throughout the world is the new way of living digitally.
In a world that is adapting to artificial intelligence, the question is what thinking skills will need to be cultivated to feel that it is still worthwhile to think. Perhaps resistance no longer consists of avoiding the tool, but in knowing how to identify the problems that are truly worth solving. There are already human “prompt” experts who sell to others how to ask things of an artificial intelligence. Laziness is the norm of contemporary human agency that depends on artificial agencies. Perhaps it has always been this way, since the invention of the wheel.
Professors and bosses know it, but no one says anything because everyone uses them. Not confessing no longer seems like an ethical lapse: it is equivalent to admitting that one used Word’s autocorrect to write an essay in 2003. What is left then? The complicit silence of those who wait for something else to take care of human tasks that were perhaps always innocuous?
What should we do with the time that artificial agency leaves us? That is the most important question. Now that we no longer have to do the laundry, let’s not waste that precious time telling the washing machine to tell itself it did a good job. That would be analogous to allowing the secret police to take away a neighbor just because he looks like a criminal.
Suggested citation: Gabriel Rojas-Andrade, The ChatGPT Tone, or the New Authoritarianism of Digital Life, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Oct. 22, 2025, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/the-chatgpt-tone-or-the-new-authoritarianism-of-digital-life/