Semester Kick-off Discussion: Che vuoi?What do LLMs want from us?

We invite you to our Semester Kick-off Discussion, bringing our new Mercator Visiting Professor for AI in the Human Context, David J. Gunkel from Chicago, into conversation with Markus Gabriel under the unsettling question: What do LLMs want from us?

The question is loosely inspired by Lacan’s Che vuoi?—“What do you want from me?”—which arises in relation to an other whose desire remains opaque, while inevitably turning us back toward ourselves. It offers an open frame for two very different philosophical encounters with LLMs. In his forthcoming The Différance Engine, Gunkel approaches these strange machines of language through deconstruction: their workings hold up a mirror to language itself, making visible how meaning, authorship, and communication have always worked. Gabriel’s recent Ethische Intelligenz (Ullstein, 2026) approaches the encounter from another direction: conversational AI increasingly reads not only what we say, but the affective and emotional patterns carried by our language, turning AI into what he calls a “magical mirror” of our own emotional self-relation. Under the umbrella of Che vuoi?, their conversation asks what kind of relation is taking shape with systems we already live and speak with—and what their different mirrors might reveal about language, emotion, desire, and ourselves.