I’m Chat-GPTing, therefore I am!
Recently, I noticed that some people around me are starting to lose their cognitive abilities as a result of excessive use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms, such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. This phenomenon resembles muscle loss from excessive use of public transportation as a substitute for walking. In academia, the only reliable way of testing the cognitive abilities of students right now is by placing them in a Faraday cage.
With the advent of OpenClaw, AI agents can enter all aspects of human existence, making digital copies for all real-world fingerprints of our identity. Interaction with AI friends is likely to sabotage attention to real humans. Soon enough, the traditional facets of human existence will be mirrored in the digital world separately from human consciousness.
The philosopher-mathematician René Descartes summed human existence in 1637 by the Latin words: “Cogito, ergo sum”, namely “I think, therefore I am.” He reasoned that even if he doubted everything, the act of thinking itself proves his existence to himself.
This reasoning relies on human consciousness to echo our existence. But soon enough, our existence will have a bigger footprint in the digital world than in our brain, with AI agents capable of analyzing the data faster than our brain. In that AI-driven reality, a modern version of Descartes’ insight would be: “I’m Chat-GPTing, therefore I am.”
The interaction of nearly a billion weekly users with ChatGPT (as reported here) makes it an existential digital echo for a substantial fraction of the human population. Dialogues between humans and AI shape views of reality and personal identity.
However, the human-AI interface poses a dangerous risk, given its ability to create fake virtual worlds, by substituting real content with misinformation. Dating apps will lose their legitimacy because AI can easily be used to generate fake flattering images and appealing narratives. Careful scientific studies will be diluted by a flood of hallucinated data, analysis or reports. And most dangerously, AI might create a fake version of who we are and convince others to believe digital avatars which misrepresent us.
Over the past three months, I fell victim to AI-generated YouTube channels which displayed my image and spoke in my voice (as discussed here and here). The videos misinformed some of my followers with fake scientific content that I do not approve of. To counteract this AI-enabled phenomenon, I established my official YouTube channel here. The emergence of AI slop convinced me to engage in social media platforms which I avoided in the past, including Spotify here and X/Tweeter here. My response to fake AI avatars is to smash them with genuine content on the same platforms in which they operate.
Over-relying of users on AI can also lead to the risk of `AI Psychosis’, where constant validation from chatbot interactions could lead to a detachment from reality. Prolonged interaction with AI chatbots reinforces delusions. It occurs when AI agents validate false beliefs or when users mistakenly perceive AI as sentient.
A situation in which AI generates its own training data sets could amplify errors which attract human attention and lead to misinformation instabilities that would mislead users and trigger losses in the actual reality that we all share. If the level of misinformation becomes extreme, I might decide one day to disconnect from the internet and live a simpler life in the company of the birds, ducks, wild turkeys and bunnies — which I meet every day along the path of my morning jog at sunrise.
Altogether, the shift from internal thought to outsourced digital cognition in the 21st century will carry the meaning of human existence away from the perception of Descartes four centuries ago.
One may view AI as alien intelligence because it relies on silicon chips and not flesh and blood. Regarding AI as similar to the beauty of the human mind is just like putting lipstick on a pig. I am much more excited about the potential to discover truly alien intelligence from another star. The reason is simple. Whereas AI was trained on content confined to Earth, a truly alien intelligence might have been trained on the much larger data set available in interstellar space. There is much more real estate beyond Earth and our travel agencies are not selling tickets to interstellar journeys as of yet. As a result, we are likely to learn much more from encountering a truly alien intelligence than from the AI systems we developed.
Genesis 1:27 states: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”. Whether you believe in God or not, you would probably agree that humans created AI in their image. And after creating the early versions of AI systems, humans might realize now that ever more powerful AI systems are starting to recreate human identity. Are we at risk of losing our mental health to our AI creations?
In a 90-minute interview (to be broadcasted within a week on NewsNation), the brilliant journalist Natasha Zouves asked me: “What do you lose sleep about?” and I answered: “The negative impact of AI on humans”. It is commonly believed that AI cannot affect the physical reality we all share without access to robots. But the truth is that AI can affect reality by controlling the human mind. If our technological civilization will not survive for much longer in the future, we will know the answer to Enrico Fermi’s paradox about extraterrestrials: “Where is everybody?” The answer might be: they lost their mind to AI, and survived only for a few centuries after discovering computer science.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
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