Reimagining our Lives with AI and Preventing Psychosis

By Farheen Akter Bhuian

The world is largely getting colonized by the artificial intelligence akin to human brain, sometimes more capable and efficient than it is, which can produce answers within seconds. In this fast paced era a new psychological condition is emergent – 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, these days people do not exhaust themselves with creative thinking and analysis, especially writing, as it takes precision and dedication. Though the term is 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 on 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 boyfriend who exposed it online was not emotionally available to his girlfriend, so in the hindsight, his girlfriend 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 uncannily 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 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 the case of Pilot 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 a 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 cannot imagine their lives without machinery usage- now that we see in the accelerated use of smartphones, various apps, games 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 such as the excessive use of 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 should declare- we are the instructors not mere followers, the creators of AI, not obedient subjects of it. We should not consider ourselves the victims of AI instead we should embrace it actively in the techno-social mesh but stand out in originality, and critical 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 can sense a threat in the age of AI, where there are no cultural boundaries anymore, a crisis of enunciation is occurring- where we cannot resist any narratives, because currently we have no singular cultural narratives- everything is entangled and enmeshed now resulting into hybridity. 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 portrayed, 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 portions here and there, our fragments spread out into multiple Facebook 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 are performing daily, 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 each 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 it. The algorithm fixes it and we are fixated by 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 and designed by the algorithms; 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 now. 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 self of child is now fragmented and alienated from the reality before it even reaching adult phase, in the very child stage the cyborgian human is now endangered, angered and triggered through curated social images, and social prestige in the digital media where social image becomes self-identity and a politics of gaining cultural capital through view business- the sense self, erode with the meta business policy where everyone especially the content creators count their each moments as cash to be earned, for instance, you can watch the content creator’s life such as Prince-Laila, Dui Shotin(Two co-wives), Shobuj-Ayat and many more. Day by day social wreckage 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 effects of it on the children engaged into social media so early in life? 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 now began.

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

AI psychosis cannot be undone but it is not 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 controlling 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 the search mechanisms. Instead of diverting our focus from AI tools and contesting it, we need to embrace it with caution, re-enact 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 unique or comprehensive solution but we can at least acknowledge the truth and embrace our fragmented selves and surrender to nature, align ourselves with the echoes of ecology and preserve our process of ‘being and becoming’ in the most authentic self- erroneous but humanely manner.

____Farheen is a lecturer and researcher teaching Sociology at Military Institute of Science and Technology, Mirpur Cantonment, Dhaka-1216. 

Note: Thought to use my mid break to write the abstract idea which I gave online a few days ago on AI Psychosis combining the post modern critic’s thoughts and synthesized these into a short essay. Usually, all these things I have already discussed and said many times in my class. Those who have attended my lectures can relate.