Educação, tecnologia e formação crítica: emancipação ou barbárie em tempos de GPT

Abstract

Adorno and Horkheimer (1985) coined the term culture industry to designate the advertising strategies of late capitalism, which intensify large-scale production and consumption standardized goods, operating from calculating and mimetic thinking that reduces consumers to statistical material. This system manipulates individuals’ integration into culture as the product of economic monopoly, capturing consumers in ways that induce them to succumb without resistance to what the market compulsively offers. At the time the term was coined, systems such as artificial intelligence or ChatGPT did not exist; however, the technical rationale based on repetition expressed by the authors is like the logic of classification, statistics, efficiency and probability of such current technological systems. Thus, although the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer (1985) date from a period before this technology, their discussion points to a system in capitalist culture oriented towards repetition and modeling that affects individuals, limiting their imagination and spontaneity, their capacity to create, in order to produce people in the same way that it models the industry as a whole. The culture industry functions as an instrument of late capitalism to sustain conservative liberalism in the name of neoliberalism, which disguises ultraliberalism (Zanolla, 2007; 2010a; 2010b, 2015, 2025). In contrast, education is not limited to institutional and formal contexts; it carries emancipatory cultural potential while dialectically engaging in both adaptation and transformation of the world. Therefore, education today has faced challenges related to technology. In particular, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) stands out as a factor in re-signifying critical and creative thinking, in a context of numerous transformations and uncertainties about the future of broader culture in a way never before seen by educators (Floridi, 2023). Thus, this work aims at a discussion that draws on Frankfurt School critical theory, updating it by highlighting the relationship between the culture industry and artificial intelligence, especially ChatGPT, its implications in the current technological context and its challenges to education. This discussion will be based primarily on Adorno (1986, 1995, 2004, 2019, 2020), Adorno and Horkheimer (1985), Benjamin (1987, 2000), and Marcuse (2015); regarding artificial intelligence, Weizenbaum (1976), Searle (1980), Floridi (2023), and Vallor (2024). This work consists of qualitative research in the human sciences (Minayo, 2002), although it also deals with quantitative data from research on the use of ChatGPT (Chatterji et al., 2025; Kosmyna et al., 2025). It is noted that the effects of using and interacting with this technology pose a particularly risks to education, particularly regarding its potential for critical thinking and autonomy. Therefore, a discussion regarding its use and ways to value human thought is necessary.