Martin Sticker (2026) expresses sympathy for our application of Kant’s formula of humanity to the morality of LLMs (Aylsworth and Castro 2024), but he also raises objections: he claims that the argument rests on an ambiguous conception of “humanity;” that it entails the absurd conclusion that every student ought to specialize in the humanities; and that we should think of LLM use in terms of the prohibition to use others as a mere means (rather than in terms of a self-regarding duty to cultivate one’s own capacities). In this paper, we defend our argument from Sticker’s objections.
