Artificial Intelligence, Personhood, Common Sense, and Democracy: A Critical Analysis

This paper examines contemporary academic denunciations of “AI-generated slop” as a symptom of a deeper epistemic crisis rather than a principled critique of artificial intelligence. Drawing on sociology of classification, philosophy of technology, and democratic theory, it argues that such charges function primarily as acts of symbolic boundary maintenance, mobilized where professional identity and epistemic authority are perceived to be under strain. The paper situates these reactions within a long historical pattern of tool panics in intellectual life, showing that what is distinctive about AI is not the recurrence of fear but the domain it enters. That of judgment itself. Building on prior critiques of “common sense” as an unreliable epistemic framework, the analysis contends that AI destabilizes not expertise per se, but the informal mediating layer through which democratic societies have traditionally translated expert knowledge into legitimate public judgment. As algorithmic systems increasingly participate in reasoning workflows, the authority of intuition, tradition, and unexamined consensus is eroded, exposing the fragility of common sense as a guide to truth. The paper concludes that the central challenge posed by artificial intelligence is neither machine cognition nor authenticity, but the reconstruction of democratic judgment under conditions where neither expertise nor intuition can claim unquestioned authority.