“The massive tendency, of young people in particular, to use AI as a confidant, psychologist or coach rather than for cognitive, technical or professional tasks, appeared to me as one of the great enigmas of the moment. Until I found the beginning of an answer… at Bergson.
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It’s a trend that has remained under the radar for a long time, even if parents who were a little attentive could see it growing among their teenagers for some time. It is now fully documented, all generations combined, as revealed last April in an article in the Harvard Business Review which caused a stir: the first use of conversational agents generated by artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity would no longer be to fulfill professional or cognitive tasks, but to offer a psychological and therapeutic service. AI would no longer primarily be a “collaborator” intended to booster the productivity of workers, managers or students, but first and foremost a confidant, a life companion or even a philosophical guide capable of allaying our big questions about the meaning of life. “I use AI every day to verbalize my thoughts. It helps me analyze my mood and provides caring feedbackexplains a witness to this vast survey, which classified uses based on user stories on large discussion forums like Reddit. Result: in a few years, the chatbots were the scene of a bifurcation “seismic”, “from efficiency to empathy”… Without ignoring that they are talking to a robot, users who address their personal torments to the machine feel listened to without being judged. We find the same trend in France. In The Worlda young high school student who did not want to bother her loved ones after a breakup testifies to the comfort she found with ChatGPT: “I realized she was a robot, but I felt listened to, and that’s what I needed. He was able to console me in his own way.” While an unemployed young man says that after seeing his robotic interlocutor acquire more and more fleshed out personality traits, he fell in love with her…
How can we understand this great confusion of orders and feelings? While I discussed my confusion over this phenomenon with several philosophers gathered for the Michel Serres d’Agen meetings this weekend, I found the beginnings of an answer thanks to Ollivier Pourriolspecialist inAlain and of Bergson…and pop culture. During one of his interventions, he recalled the origin of a notion that has passed into common language, that of “soul supplement”. It is often used, in a somewhat pejorative way, to say that a project or a company, commercial for example, would need this supplement in order not to wither away… However, we owe it to Henri Bergson, where it has a much more precise meaning. At the end of Two Sources of Morality and Religionpublished in 1932, it takes stock of the technological leap induced by the industrial revolution which made it possible, with oil and coal, to “converting potential energies accumulated over millions of years into movement”. This leap endowed collective humanity with a new body “disproportionately powerful” in relation to the soul of men which remains what it was, “too small and too weak to lead it”. Hence a void between the two, between the increased technological power of humanity and the weakness of the spirit, between mechanics and mysticism. And Bergson concludes: “Let us not limit ourselves to saying, as we did above, that mysticism calls for mechanics. Let us add that the enlarged body expects a supplement of soul, and that mechanics would require a mysticism.” Humanity, disproportionately enlarged by technology, does not yet have a soul or spirit commensurate with its technological power; she needs some extra soul. This is the meaning of Bergson’s formula.
What does this have to do with ChatGPT and its new therapeutic uses? This is where Ollivier Pourriol has an original thesis. “Artificial Intelligence, and chatbots especially, he recalls,t is language – but a mechanical language, based on an infinite stock of available statements and their probabilistic processing. Except that this purely mechanical device gives the illusion that the statements it produces, often very relevant, come from a mind, from an intelligence. Even more so if the statements in question are of a psychological or existential nature and take the form of an exchange. People have the illusion that chatbots bring them the extra soul that technology has been lacking until now. When in reality, far from filling the gap between mechanics and mysticism that Bergson spoke of, ChatGPT reinforces it.” In short, ChatGPT in psycho mode is the supplement of mystical soul that technology dreamed of bringing to its own void, but a supplement that accentuates the void instead of filling it.. »
