President Trump recently postponed an Executive Order setting guardrails on artificial intelligence development. A great deal has been written about how artificial intelligence could take jobs away from millions of Americans, drive rampant unemployment and usher in the need for a universal basic income. Yet AI represents an even more profound threat to the human psyche: the destruction of the core self.
The core self is what defines each of us as an individual, with particular interests, abilities, beliefs and dreams. To the extent a person becomes himself or herself, that person will feel self-actualized. This is no trivial thing. For most people, that journey is what life is all about.
It has never been easy to become oneself. The early chapters of our life stories fill our unconscious minds with the agendas of others and myths about our truest paths forward. Traumas great and small create fear of loss, ridicule, or defeat that undermine the quiet courage needed to move in the direction truest to our souls.
I believe AI has emerged as the most profound threat to the self in history. It lulls us into the fixed and false belief that profound human endeavors like seeking knowledge, writing from one’s heart, creating art, thinking strategically and even feeling understood can be outsourced to ChatGPT, Claude and the like—that GPS for the mind and soul doesn’t do any damage to one’s inner sense of direction.
This is patently untrue. Outsourcing one’s mind to AI not only erodes our creative thinking, intellectual rigor and sense of self, it fosters the delusion (which just happens to be defined as a fixed and false belief, by the way) that what is served up to us from a server is “ours,” as though it is enough to be the curator of thoughts generated by a machine, rather than the originator of them from one’s own mind. Not so.
Using AI routinely to generate content, ideas and “insights” is toxic to the self and can, ultimately, dissolve it into the ultimate form of groupthink. It will, ultimately, make people feel emotionally and intellectually lost, listless and weak. This is the most threatening pandemic we have ever known—a psychological Black Death—and the problem is that almost everyone is more or less happily rushing to be infected, lest they be left behind and feel foolish for not tapping into the miracle of modern technology.
Those who worried we would be “chipped” by our employers or Neuralink or the government, in order to vote or enjoy other rights or privileges, turn out to have been naïve. No chips are needed. We human beings have an Achilles heel that makes it easy to virtually “chip” us by absorbing our thoughts, feelings and ideas, transmuting into something slightly or more-than-slightly different through AI and feeding them back to us as “ours, but better.” Neither is true, but it feels true—just like all the false cues from childhood relationships and from early traumas about who we truly are and might become.
Here’s one example: This article. My article. Not a word of it was generated by AI, but resisting the temptation to use AI, instead of writing it myself, wasn’t so easy. I had to decide to spend about two hours writing this, instead of prompting ChatGPT to write it for me in seconds, then editing it in minutes. Wouldn’t it have been “the same?” No. It would have been the work of a machine, polished by me, and it would have turned me into an intellectually flabby liar, the moment I put my name on it. Lying is very toxic to the core self, too.
What to do? Though refusing to use AI would be the surest way to preserve the self, most everyone will rush to be infected by AI. And all of us will absorb the viral vector of AI-generated content, anyhow. There’s really no way to screen it out of what we see or read. That means it must be actively opposed by activities that strengthen the self. Exercising can keep us “in” our bodies, getting out in nature can remind us that God is still infinitely superior to Claude, engaging in psychotherapy or life coaching can help us find our truest selves and experience the miracle of human empathy, saying what we really think (and hearing our own words from our own mouths) can reinforce our ideas and ideals, meditating can center us.
It simply won’t be enough, anymore, to live life without a clear plan to preserve and discover our core selves.
Dr. Keith Ablow practiced psychiatry for 25 years. He is now a life coach focused on helping his clients overcome adversity and achieve their highest goals by discovering, preserving and strengthening their true, core selves.