Die ich rief, die Geister: the Humiliated Apprentice, the Rebellious Apprentice and Generative Artificial Intelligence as Hoarder of Knowledge

Goethe's Der Zauberlehrling (1797) is often appropriated as an allegory for the risks of generative artificial intelligence, with the user cast as the apprentice and the system as the broom out of control. Through a comparative reading of narrative type ATU 325 and an analysis of the transtextual dialogues that articulate its contemporary reception, I follow the distinction Zipes draws in The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2017) between two traditions of the tale: that of the humiliated apprentice, prototyped by Lucian of Samosata, which individualises their guilt; and that of the rebellious apprentice, present in Ovid, Somadeva, Attar and various oral traditions, which locates the problem in the unequal distribution of knowledge. Goethe canonised the humiliated version in modernity, and Dukas (1897) and Disney (1940) amplified it into its contemporary hegemony. Against that appropriation, I propose to invert the contemporary mapping to read generative AI systems as structural occupants of the master's position, since they concentrate and retain the resources that make it possible to validate and judge knowledge. Recovering the tradition of the rebellious apprentice allows for a critique of this hoarding that the dominant reading obscures.