Bad Faith in the Age of AI

Bad faith in the age of AI is the existentialist diagnosis of the builder who denies responsibility for her choices by attributing them to external necessity. Beauvoir's concept of mauvaise foi—self-deception about one's own freedom—takes a specific contemporary form: the claim that AI adoption is inevitable, that competitive pressure leaves no alternative, that the technology determines what must be built and how. This is bad faith because the builder always has choices—costly choices, constrained choices, but choices nonetheless. The developer who says 'I must use AI or fall behind' is fleeing from the recognition that she could choose otherwise and is choosing not to. The entrepreneur who builds extractive systems and cites market forces is refusing to acknowledge that markets are human constructions whose rules can be contested and changed. Bad faith converts moral questions into technical problems, treating value commitments as natural facts, and thereby exempting the agent from the responsibility of justification.