"Brain and Beyond: Emotional AI – What Does It Mean for Our Humanity?" Lecture by Prof. Markus Gabriel at the DZNE

With the rapid spread and scaling of interactive conversational AI (such as ChatGPT, Claude, and others), an unexpected development has taken place that I refer to as the “emotional turn.” AI systems are beginning to treat language no longer primarily as a medium of knowledge, argumentation, and the description of reality, but as a carrier of hidden emotional signals. They recognize affective patterns, read between the lines, and thereby approach a realm we long regarded as the last stronghold of the human: our feelings, inner tensions, and unspoken impulses.

This shift fundamentally transforms the concept of intelligence in AI. It no longer merely simulates rationality; it penetrates into the depths of our emotional self-relation. In the lecture, I reconstruct this development and ask how we must newly understand and learn our humanity in the “magical mirror” of conversational AI.

Lecture in German: We will offer a German–English simultaneous translation via Zoom, in combination with your personal mobile phone, tablet, or laptop and a headset. You will receive the access information for the simultaneous translation on site.