A Note From The CAI Co-Chairs
by Todd Essig, PhD and Amy Levy, PsyD
A cornerstone for CAI projects is making space in the cultural conversation for a psychoanalytic perspective on the accelerating AI age. We do this because we believe the future needs what we have: our values, our worldview, and the experiences psychoanalytic care affords. Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), which calls attention to a Catholic perspective on AI and the risks it poses to humanity, presents an opportunity for the CAI to articulate a psychoanalytic response. But what should that response be? To this end, our Co-Chairs’ Note is an effort to share our process about how we develop a CAI project.
There’s much to admire and learn from in the encyclical. It is a morally ambitious statement about preserving human dignity as AI impacts war, unemployment, oligarchy, and algorithmic opacity. Because of its particular orientation, it leaves much room open for psychoanalysis to elaborate on the cultural and psychological transformation brought on by the personal, intimate relationships people are having with relational AIs.
About chatbot relationships, the Pope writes: “The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject.”
There are several substantive points the CAI can address. The first is that while problems emerge for “less discerning” AI users, the relational pull of chatbots is not parasitic on a mistake in discernment; it’s built into the very way bots co-opt the fundamental human attachment system. They create the illusion of interacting with a sentient, caring, human-like subject no matter how discerning one is.
And, of course, there is the dark side — the loss and damage that can accrue to even the most discerning when engaging in genuinely helpful chatbot relationships. For example, there are risks to critical thinking and skill development/maintenance from cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender. Even more insidious are the ways profit-seeking user engagement maximization leads users to prefer chatbot interactions over human relations. This relational offloading is an ever-present risk.
Conscious discernment is simply not powerful enough to protect against those dangers. The alchemy of relational AI power with unconscious desires, fantasies, and defenses can make even the most discerning of people act, at times, with a remarkable lack of discernment. Rather than the either-or of discernment to resist, or not, at the CAI we are advocating for a both-and, a complex oscillating dance of intersubjective immersion with reflective awareness. As we are never fully able to discern the other, whether without or within, such an approach offers us the best chance of maintaining some psychological sovereignty in the face of this new and captivating AI other.
These are all preliminary thoughts that led us to take the first steps towards what we are calling the “Conflictual Humanity” project. To start the process, we began discussing the idea at our most recent monthly meeting. While we may not know what happens next, we do know how conversation with CAI members enriches and deepens preliminary thoughts. Will a CAI member run with this and write something for The CAI Report? Will it enter into our stream of CAI Currents, serve as a topic for CAI Conversations, or grow into a bespoke project unique to the topic?
We don’t know. But this is how things get started.
