Pulling Our Strings. Atmospheric Experience and Background Exploitation in the Age of AI

This paper develops the concept of background exploitation to argue that artificial intelligence’s (AI) most profound manipulative power lies not in influencing current beliefs or emotions, but in intervening in the pre-reflective conditions that mediate immediate experience—our backgrounds. Drawing on phenomenology and Robert Musil’s notions of the “invisible” and the “nonexistent,” the paper reconceptualizes atmospheres as based on pre-reflective associations mediated by individual backgrounds. On this basis, two distinct modes of AI-driven background exploitation are distinguished: background hijacking, which exploits existing backgrounds in situ, and background entrapment, which gradually recalibrates backgrounds over time. While current debates in AI ethics and affective computing primarily address the former, the paper argues that they fail to capture the latter—AI’s growing capacity to reshape the very conditions through which immediate experience is mediated.