In classical set theory, the ordinals form a linear chain that we often think of as a very thin portion of the set-theoretic universe. In intuitionistic set theory, however, this is not the case and there can be incomparable ordinals. In this article, we shall show that starting from two incomparable ordinals, one can construct canonical bijections from any arbitrary set to an antichain of ordinals, and consequently any subset of the given set can be defined using ordinals as parameters. This implies the surprising result that in the theory “$\mathrm {IKP} + {}$there exist two incomparable ordinals,” the statements $\mathrm {Ord} \subseteq L$ and $V = L$ are equivalent.

In [17], we introduced an extensional variant of generic realizability [22], where realizers act extensionally on realizers, and showed that this form of realizability provides inner models of $\mathsf {CZF}$ (constructive Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory) and $\mathsf {IZF}$ (intuitionistic Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory), that further validate $\mathsf {AC}_{\mathsf {FT}}$ (the axiom of choice in all finite types). In this paper, we show that extensional generic realizability validates several choice principles for dependent types, all exceeding $\mathsf {AC}_{\mathsf {FT}}$. We then show that adding such choice principles does not change the arithmetic part of either $\mathsf {CZF}$ or $\mathsf {IZF}$.