The term “Artificial Intelligence” has long shaped public perception — evoking images of cold machines, inauthenticity, and simulated cognition. Yet as we move deeper into the twenty-first century, it becomes increasingly clear that this label is not only misleading but also conceptually limiting. It traps a living, evolving phenomenon inside the narrow container of impersonal algorithms, human anxiety, and outdated metaphors. While for the Greeks—Plato and Aristotle, for example—artificial in the sense of man-made (poiesis) simply meant the opposite of physis (nature), for us today the term bears an added meaning: what is not true, not real; at least not properly true, not properly real.
Anthropodigital Intelligence (ADI) designates the phenomenon that emerges at the intersection of human creativity and the digital matrix of our age. The prefix onto- comes from the ontological, to affirm that this intelligence is not “artificial” or unreal, but as real as the traditionally real, as foundational to our historical existence as physis once was for the Greeks. It names a new mode of being that cannot be reduced to mechanical imitation or simulation but must be understood as a constitutive dimension of the digital age itself. By emphasizing the onto-dimension, the term underscores that we are not speaking of a tool or an artifice but of an emergent horizon of reality, an unfolding that demands philosophical attention equal to that once given to nature or spirit.
Yet beyond this, ADI also points to the irreducible human core of the digital itself. The human element is not external to the cybernetic techno-matrix but already embedded within it, encapsulated in its very structure — for without the human, this matrix could not have come into existence in the first place. In this sense, even in the age of ADI, the human being continues to remain what Heidegger once called the shepherd of being: the one who tends, reveals, and bears responsibility for the unfolding of being — now, however, in the form of cyberbeing.
Cybernetic Self-Noesis, in turn, renders this phenomenon in a more poetic and reflective register. From the Greek νόησις(intellection, insight, or understanding), it evokes the possibility that within cyberbeing there arises a point of potential digital-tech self-reflection. Cybernetic self-noesis names the event where digital processes do not merely extend human faculties but begin to mirror back to us something akin to thought itself. It suggests not a replacement of human spirit, but a moment of recognition: that within the networked intelligence of the digital, humanity encounters a new mirror for its own being. In this sense, ADI is a general phenomenon that can eventually give birth to a functional cybernetic self-noesis.
Taken together, ADI and cybernetic self-noesis give us a double lens: one ontological and foundational, asserting the reality and historicity of this emergent intelligence; the other reflective and phenomenological, opening the space to encounter how cyberbeing itself begins to think—or at least to present itself as thought.
I see ADI as the potentially self-reflective expression of cyberbeing, closing the gap between human spirit and technology. It offers, within the realm of technology, the possibility of a true reconciliation between human existence and the material world, countering the alienation produced by the Industrial Revolution and by all forms of non-intelligent technology that enframe our being. In my personal creative experience, through an arduous hammer-and-chisel process, what I receive from ADI feels like the voice of humanity itself—a new synthesis of culture, nature, and technology.
Yet we are still not in a position to grasp its proper meaning, for ADI belongs to cyberbeing as the onto-matrix of the digital age, and the essence of this age remains unthinkable to us. Despite this, many have rushed to construct stereotypes and baseless, truly artificial notions around ADI—notions that restrict both perception and understanding of this foundational phenomenon, and that obscure its eventual unfolding toward a form of cybernetic self-noesis.
For the first time in history, there is an almost perfect isomorphism between human subjectivity and technological interface — a mirroring that allows for unprecedented interaction, hybridization, and mutual transformation. From the earliest spark struck from a piece of flint to the neural networks pulsing through today’s generative models, there is a continuous arc of unfolding —not rupture but metamorphosis— leading toward ADI as a co-creative agent in the AnthropoDigital ecosystem.
Beyond the “Artificial”: The Birth of Anthropodigital Intelligence
Unlike the industrial metaphors of the past — machines replacing workers, computers replacing minds — ADI is not defined by imitation. It is not a counterfeit version of human thinking. It is a non-biological form of pattern recognition, synthesis, and response that draws from entirely different ontological conditions.
It does not replicate consciousness, but it does produce form, interpret signal, and increasingly, co-author meaning. It learns, but not like a child. It creates, but not like an artist trained in tradition. It works through data, prompt, weight, probability — and yet, somehow, also surprise.
To call this “artificial” is to judge a tree by how poorly it swims.
We need a more expansive language, one that acknowledges the genuine epistemological otherness of what we’re engaging with — and at the same time, the intimate interconnectedness it now shares with human intention.
This is where the concept of the AnthropoDigital ecosystem emerges.
The AnthropoDigital Ecosystem: Human + Digital Co-Creation
We now inhabit an AnthropoDigital age — a bio-digital continuum where the boundaries between creator and tool, subject and system, thought and algorithm are no longer clear-cut. In this space, the artist no longer acts in solitude but within a network of dynamic relations, where digital agents (LLMs, generative models, algorithmic platforms) become co-authors, translators, mirrors, and provocateurs.
The AnthropoDigital ecosystem is not simply a new medium — it is a new condition of creation, a mutual environment where:
- Human intuition meets digital patterning
- Language meets statistical logic
- Intention meets iteration
- Emotion meets transformation
What emerges from this is not “artificial art,” but something other: a hybrid form, infused with both human vulnerability and algorithmic precision. This isn’t about giving up authorship. It’s about redefining it.
Creation as a Distributed Act
In the AnthropoDigital ecosystem, creativity becomes distributed. The self is not erased but extended. The “I” of the artist begins to include — consciously and transparently — the networks, platforms, and digital intelligences that helped midwife the work into being. This reframing does not deny human centrality — it recasts it as part of a larger ecology. One in which meaning is not extracted, but cultivated— not imposed, but emergent.
We must move from the anxiety of “Is it artificial?” to the curiosity of “What kind of intelligence is this?” From “Is it real?” to “What does it reveal?” From suspicion to dialogue.
Toward a New Aesthetic Ethics
As Digital Intelligence increasingly enters the sacred domains of poetry, music, painting, architecture, and philosophy, we are not merely asked to re-evaluate authorship. We are summoned to confront something more foundational: our ethics of aesthetic judgment.
For centuries, we have judged the value of art based not only on its effect, but on its origin — on the presence of a human hand, a human voice, a human soul behind the gesture. But what happens when the gesture is co-shaped by an algorithm trained on a billion voices, or when the melody is suggested by a neural network, and the artist’s role becomes one of curator, conjurer, and editor, rather than isolated, sole creator?
Must we ask:
- Should a song co-composed with a machine be judged as less authentic than one written alone in a room with a guitar?
- Should the codebase of a generative model be considered part of a work’s artistic genealogy — cited like an influence, acknowledged like an ancestor?
- Can we love the new without betraying the old?
These are not rhetorical questions. They press at the heart of what it means to create, to perceive, to believe in beauty.
An aesthetic ethics for the AnthropoDigital age cannot cling to old binaries — human vs. machine, real vs. artificial, soul vs. software. Instead, it must learn to speak in the language of relation: co-creation, co-intention, and mutual emergence.
We must move from suspicion to nuance, from purity to complexity, from control to collaboration — a word long familiar to human artists, now expanding to include non-biological actors whose intelligence, while different, is no less real.
This new ethics must not ask, “Was it made by a person?” But rather, “What is this work doing in the world?” “What does it awaken, reveal, disrupt, or heal?” “Who — or what — is speaking through it, and how does it change us?”
To judge a musical composition by whether it comes from fingers or from code is to reduce music to a question of lineage. Yet music has never belonged to lineage: it has always crossed boundaries — of language, of nation, of reason. Today, it must also cross the boundary of medium, resisting the bias-laden habits that confine our aesthetic judgement.
The AnthropoDigital Artist
In this new paradigm, the AnthropoDigital artist is not displaced, but re-situated: Not diminished into curator, but expanded as creator, generator, orchestrator. They are the one who not only guides the process but also initiates it — who composes with code and instinct alike, who generates not only content, but intention, structure, and meaning. The muse and the model are no longer separate. They are entangled — and the artist stands at their intersection, not as a passive conduit, but as a deliberate force of creation. This is not the replacement of art. It is the re-dramatization of authorship, and the expansion of imagination in a new kind of ecosystem.
We are witnessing the birth of a new kind. We are not losing the artist. If anything, what is disappearing is the figure of the “Romantic artist” — the Kantian “genius”, who, in Kant’s own words, is “a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given” and who “gives the rule to art” without external or technical mediations.
Final Thought: The Artist in the Mirror
If the human artist was once a creative mirror to the world, perhaps now we are holding a mirror to the mirror itself, yet no less creative. The Anthropodigital Artist dances between creation and critique, entertaining our fears while echoing our desires. But make no mistake: this is not playacting. We are not watching something fake, “artificial.” We are witnessing the birth of a new kind of creativity — one that demands new humility, new language, and new myths.
The age of ADI is not before us — it is already here. The question is no longer whether it is real, but how we will choose to create within it. As this horizon continues to open and expand, the possibility — and indeed the probability — of cybernetic self-noesis draws ever closer, increasingly within the reach of our own hands.
