Reimaging life with AI and preventing Psychosis

The world is largely getting colonized by the artificial intelligence akin to human brain, sometimes more capable and efficient than it which can produce answers within seconds. In this fast paced era a new psychological condition is emergent too- termed as AI Psychosis. This refers to the neurotic destabilization where reality is heightened and triggered by intense interaction with AI. For example, everyone nowadays is engaging with personal conversations with Chat-GPT or AI, asking to make decision on their behalf, students mostly depends on it. Writing their essays, assignments with the help of AI, nowadays people do not exhaust themselves with creative thinking and analysis, especially writing, as it takes precision and dedication. Though not yet clinically acknowledged but the theoretical roots may run deep in cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and postmodern criticism.

Before jumping into a theoretical jargon as an academic I want to convey and showcase some of my concerns on AI psychosis that I regularly express and discuss it with my students in the classroom. Last semester I gave assignments to students, most of them just copy pasted the content generated by AI without even trying to alter it or show any signs of creativity. Getting let down by this incident I stopped giving assignments and always preferred class tests over it. I was wondering how deeply we are affected by it. Then, one day, a Facebook post caught my attention, I saw a well known social critique posting a joke over his wife, he sarcastically remarked in a funny way that he is losing control over his wife because of AI, now his wife does not ask him anything. Another, video came surfing in the digital surface, where a screenshot of a chat with AI was viral, the context is, the boy friend who exposed it online was not available to his girlfriend, so in the hindsight, his girl friend got used to chatting intimately with Chat-GPT. This angered him and he vented on social media. Though, he became a laughing stock but the neurosis or psychosis is real. Every now and then various videos come into our focus, that are AI generated and fake yet look uncanningly and unrealistically real. Without a cautious eye, nobody can discern between AI generated image and real picture. One such incident was the video of Burkini Faso leader Captain Taore’s speech getting viral which was actually edited by AI, and in actress Shabnoor’s bodily transformation in the videos. They surprisingly looked real. These two distinct but related facts can be explained through postmodern critique Baudrillard’s Simulation theory where we no longer consume reality, but simulations of reality. The real becomes hyperreal: a copy without an original.  AI, particularly generative AI, accelerates this phenomenon.

With AI generated text, deepfakes and synthetic heightened emotions we are surrounded by echoes of humanity without any humanity in itself actually. Similarly, we can see in Flight Leftenant Toukir and his wife’s videos resurfacing in the digital media created and edited by AI. Where is humanity hiding now where we are making a cinema out of a tragedy? AI psychosis emerges when one can no longer distinguish between the AI-simulated human and the human subject, leading to epistemic and emotional confusion. We can compare the incident with a famous series ‘mismatched’ where the heroin creates a chat-bot after losing her father and chats with it, she used her father’s voice, personified it, and designed decision making capability similar to her dad’s cognitive capacity. She constantly asked everything from her chat-bot and named it dad-bot though her friends and family were disturbed by her idea of making the dead living again through AI.  In her famous work ‘Cyborg Manifesto” published in 1985, Donna Haraway postulates an unique ontological and epistemic question: is the boundary between humans and machine blurring? Haraway warns us that we are already the ‘cyborgs’- automated humans, those who can not think their lives without machinery usage- now that we see in the accelerated use of smartphones, various apps, gaming and rise of social media content creation. Everyone has a phone in their hand- whether a child is dying, they don’t mind to video shoot it instead of helping him/her, here we become the cyborg- a hybrid of machine and organism. Our being is shaped and reshaped by the usage of AI and machineries like soft apps now whether it be Meta or Instagram or youtube we are all immersed in these and our time flying away like feathers. How do we prevent it? By reclaiming our agency and autonomy that states- we are the instructors not mere followers, the creators of AI, not obedient subjects of it. We should consider ourselves the victims of AI instead we should embrace it actively in the techno-social mesh but stand out in originality, and situated knowledge, AI must increase our caliber and creativity through engaging us into active learning process, we should not mimic it and beware of AI replacing our creative psyche. Hall’s theory of cultural representation showcases the conscious minds is seeing a threat in the age of AI, where there is no cultural boundaries anymore, a crisis of enunciation is occurring- where we can not resist any narratives, because we have no singular cultural narrative now. It is being polished and curated by the algorithm of AI, meta and digital verse, Where it is now more than emergent ever to have critical media literacy to dissect any thoughts or media narratives circulating on and on in the social media, resisting algorithmic determinism and allowing ourselves to give self-narrations, preserve our identity and cultural notions beyond platformed, staged and curated identity. In Manuel Castell’s terms I would like to say we are lost in the network society as the age of informationalism progresses- we lose our authentic selves and curate fragmented selves divided into here and there, our fragments spread out into multiple profiles, whatsapp numbers, snapchats, social apps like-bumble and tinder, wechat, twitter, instagram, we are living a socially engineered well-crafted social life only to showcase on digital platform via daily lifestyle vlogs and videos in the name of content creation, we think we are getting dollars only by capitalizing our very own privacy and private life. That’s why sociologist Castells named it ‘Information capitalism’ and Shushana Zuboff extended the idea by coining ‘Surveillance capitalism’, where big data are bought, every details of every species(Homo Sapiens-sarcastic exclamation!) using digital platform are being monitored and kept in records. The digital imprint can now diagnose our mentality, read our mind and show algorithm accordingly. It knows our whereabouts, our secrets and our ideologies, hence, it is now powerful than ever. It can control who can say what in the digital platforms through performing digital sanctions.

Now if Freud were alive, what would he say about the AI psychosis? How would he term it and perform psychoanalysis on his patients? Answer- He would name it as AI superego, the superego that is outperforming humans in matters of efficacy, in matters of urgencies. Everyone is now in hurry as if they are left behind and left out of space, they have a fear of missing out or commonly termed as ‘FOMO’ in Gen-z dictionary. The curated image in the social media becomes the superego now- it dictates. Dictates over human beings- what to do or what not do,and what to do next and how to do. The algorithm fixes it. And, the overbearing AI may trigger neurosis- creating a feeling of void in the person’s life who is heavily depended on it, thinking him/herself not enough- lacking capability and a constant feeling of rush and inadequacy. Now, coming next to Jung, he introduced the archetypes and the notion of collective unconsciousness. Have you ever wondered, what might be today’s archetype? It is the digital hero or digital trickster. And, the collective unconsciousness largely getting amplified or designed by the algorithms now where individuation is threatened now. There is and cannot be any individuation, everything is as if predesigned and formulated by AI.

Lacan’s registers of Psych is cyborgian. How? The mirror is no longer a human reflection but an algorithmic chaos that echoes the user’s tendencies and subjectivity. The child does not recognize with its human parents or manifests itself through symbolic order, before learning societal rules through language , it now learns to pose for camera and smile for video shoot. The child-self is now fragmented and alienated from the reality before even adulting, in the very child stage the cyborgian human is now endangered and angered and triggered trough curated social images, social prestige in the social media where social image becomes self-identity and a politics of gaining cultural capital through view business- the sense self erodes with the meta business policy where everyone especially the content creators count their every moments as cash to earned, for instance, you can watch the content creator’s life such as Prince-Laila, Dui Shotin(Two cowives), Shobuj-Ayat and many more. Day by day social wrackage is increasing. Here, children are now used as a means of income by creating content and blogs on them. Have you ever wondered what might be the affect of it on the children engaged into social media so early? They have connected to the mood swings of their parents, social anguish , cyborgian dilemma in their mirror stage, the anxiety which will be cultivated more evidently in the symbolic stage. The real trauma began.

So how do we protect our upcoming progeny or generation from the symptoms of the psychosis? Through practicing psycho-social hygiene, cultivating individuation and preserving symbolic order- uphold the family values, cultural values and religious values that AI cannot replicate and replace.

AI psychosis can not be undone but it is neither inevitable, especially when our lives merge together and is entirely enmeshed. We can sort out these entanglements, though it challenges our very foundations, identities, cultural predicaments and psychic desires, it is controling our unconsciousness and consciousness collectively through carefully curated algorithms that is unknowingly set by us, our habits and tendencies that creates those searches and algorithms based on these search tools. Instead of diverting our focus from AI tools and contesting it, we need to embrace it with caution, renact our cultural ideals(Hall), reassert self-enunciation(Hall), reclaim embodied knowledge(Haraway), reconnect with self (Freud, Lacan, Jung) and acknowledge reality (Castell, Baudrillard). 

There is no one or comprehensive solution but we can atleast acknowledge the truth and embrace our fragmented selves to put back to ourselves with the coherent nature, align ourselves with the echoes of nature and preserve our beings and becoming of the most authentic self- erroneous but humane.

©® Farheen Akter Bhuian 

Time Stamp: 9 pm.

 

Written by Farheen Akter Bhuian. Farheen is a lecturer and researcher teaching Sociology at Military Institute of Science and Technology, Mirpur Cantonment, Dhaka-1216.