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Artificial intelligence is arguably the most rapidly advancing technology humans have ever developed. A year ago you wouldn’t often hear AI come up in a regular conversation, but today it seems there’s constant talk about how generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E will affect the future of work, the spread of information, and more. A major question that has thus far been almost entirely unexamined is how this AI-dominated future will affect people’s minds.
There’s been some research into how using AI in their jobs will affect people mentally, but there isn’t yet an understanding of how simply living amongst so much AI-generated content and systems will affect people’s sense of the world. How is AI going to change individuals and society in the not-too-distant future?
AI will obviously make it easier to produce disinformation—from fake images to deepfakes to fake news. That will affect people’s sense of trust as they’re scrolling on social media. AI can also allow someone to imitate your loved ones, which further erodes people’s general ability to trust what was once unquestionable. That may also affect how they think about identity.
Your own identity can be threatened by deepfakes, too, if people are creating images or videos of you doing things you never actually did. In the US, people often identify with their jobs, and those could soon be threatened. Will AI make people more reliant on and distracted by technology at a time when that’s already a major issue? There are countless ways AI could reshape how people operate in the world. But researchers are only just beginning to grapple with the implications of an AI-saturated existence.
Larry Rosen, a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, says he worries that AI will make people more reliant on technology. Humans like things to be as simple and easy as possible, to avoid stress, he says, so people might start automating every aspect of their life that they can.
In the same way you might use Google Maps to get everywhere and not know how to get there otherwise, AI might cause people to stop learning things they would have otherwise had to learn. Ironically, though, Rosen thinks this could cause more stress as people are inundated with AI and constantly shifting gears and not seeing anything quite clearly.
“I get concerned about the fact that we just blindly believe the GPS. We don’t question it. Are we just going to blindly believe the AI?” Rosen says. “As it is, we’re overwhelmed. We’re so overwhelmed that we can’t make ourselves do a simple task and see it to completion. Anxiety is just going to ratchet up as we’re faced with this unknown thing in our world.”
Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, says he thinks AI could create a “post-truth world.” He says it will likely make it significantly easier to convince people of false narratives, which will be disruptive in many ways.
