Dear Dr Danielle

A psychoanalyst answers your questions about human-AI relations

 

Dear Dr Danielle,

I’m a veteran academic researcher, not technophobic by any standard, and by all rights I should be jumping to embrace AI tools to help advance my work. Instead, I’m resistant to the point of paranoia. I find interacting with AI chatbots creepy, insist to anyone who will listen that AI content is invariably shallow, and have taken to avoiding even AI-generated web search results. Why am I so resistant to the new wave of progress? How can I overcome my irrational opposition?

Many thanks,

Inveterate Humanist

 

Dear Inveterate Humanist,

You’ve come to the right place — though perhaps not for the answer you expected.

Let’s start with the contradiction you’ve handed me, because it’s a good one. You say you are not technophobic; and yet you avoid, recoil, and evangelize your resistance to anyone who will listen, experiencing what you yourself call paranoia. In clinical terms, that gap between self-image and behavior has a name: a split. You hold onto the identity of the open-minded researcher while enacting something that looks remarkably like a phobia, complete with contamination anxiety around AI-curated search results. The question isn’t whether you’re resistant. It’s what the resistance is protecting.

Your specific complaints deserve to be taken seriously. The “creepiness” tracks the uncanny, that Freudian register of the disturbingly familiar, the human-seeming that is not human. The shallowness complaint points at what AI structurally cannot do: bring genuine uncertainty, genuine ignorance, genuine surprise to an encounter. These are real perceptions, not mere neurosis. But they don’t explain the intensity of your reaction, or the missionary zeal with which you spread it. When resistance becomes evangelism, something more personal is usually at stake.

Here is my deeper hypothesis. You are not just a researcher; you are a veteran researcher. You have acquired decades of cultivating expertise, judgment, and the capacity for fluent, synthesized thought on difficult questions. Now along comes a technology that produces exactly that, on demand, for anyone. What does that do to an identity built on intellectual distinction? The threat AI poses to you may not be epistemological at all. It may be to the ego ideal, the image of yourself as someone whose knowledge is hard-won, irreplaceable, and uniquely human. If so, the resistance isn’t irrational. It’s self-protective. And it makes complete sense.

But here is the provocation I cannot resist: where is your curiosity? You have spent a career sitting with discomfort, tolerating not-knowing, following the evidence into uncomfortable places. That is the job of a researcher. And yet when faced with this particular unknown, your curiosity has gone suspiciously quiet and been replaced by a verdict rendered without sustained inquiry. For a veteran researcher, that is the most telling symptom of all.

You say you should be jumping to embrace these tools. The word “should” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Should, according to whom? Your colleagues? The culture? Or some part of yourself that senses there is something here worth understanding and that finds that prospect more unsettling than the technology itself?

The uncanny thing about AI isn’t simply that its alien. It’s that it holds up a mirror. I hope when you’re ready, you’ll find the reflection more interesting than frightening.

With warmth and a raised eyebrow,

Warmly,
Dr. Danielle

 

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Dr. Danielle is Danielle Knafo, PhD

If you’d like to submit a letter seeking Dr. Danielle’s advice on anything around human-AI relations, please write to [email protected] with a copy to [email protected].