Conscience and Practical Judgment in Kant: A Framework for Theorising AI Guilt

A growing body of literature investigating the impacts of generative AI use in academia points to the phenomenon of ‘AI guilt’ – a sense of moral discomfort experienced by students who employ generative AI to assist with academic tasks that would usually demand (human) intellectual labour . Existing research theorises AI guilt as a psychological or sociological response to rapid technological change. Yet space remains for a distinctly philosophical inquiry into the normative significance of these experiences and what they reveal about moral agency in an age of technological uncertainty. This paper advances a Kantian reading of AI guilt, drawing on Kant’s conception of conscience and the nature of its operation with regards to practical reason and judgment. By drawing on these elements of Kant’s moral psychology, I argue that the phenomenon of AI guilt is significant not because it necessarily indicates wrongdoing, but because it emerges in contexts where uncertainty weakens the agent’s ability to determine how the moral principles integral to the academic tradition apply to novel technological practices. The use of generative AI in assisting academic output therefore raises broader questions regarding the relationship between conscience, uncertainty, and moral responsibility. Through my analysis, I question whether AI guilt is best understood as a justified response to failures of judgment, or rather as symptomatic of the barriers conscience encounters when evaluating the process of judgment motivating unprecedented, and arguably morally ambiguous, forms of action. The paper therefore takes AI guilt as revealing a deeper tension between conscience’s demand for moral certainty and the difficulties of exercising practical judgement in an age of rapid technological development.