How Al is reshaping our understanding of grief and emotional healing

ANY conversation about artificial intelligence, be it condemning or approving, is bound to engage its essential selling point: making life easier.

- Jayson Greene

For those who embrace these digital developments as a cumulative hallmark of evolution, the ease proffered by AI is likely to register as one bonus among many. What new echelons of human potential might we unlock once we've liberated our minds from so much cognitive drudgery and irritation?

Did you detect skepticism in that last sentence? If so, your instincts are apt: I reject these programs on ethical, environmental and creative grounds. Yet, like so many of my fellow university instructors, I spend significant time thinking about the seductive ease of generative AI programs like ChatGPT, the fruits of which emerge in my students’ submitted work, despite my vigorous exertions to forbid them.

The issue, I surmise, is not merely logistical - college students are overbooked; using ChatGPT saves time - but emotional, even existential. A befuddled consciousness yields physiological discomfort, and most intellectual work entails spates of confusion, together with other ambivalent, even downright unpleasant feelings: among them, frustration, anxiety and fear of inadequacy. There is allure in opting out — in seeking, through Al's ministrations, a less-agitated conscious mind.

Jayson Greene's debut novel, UnWorld, plunges into this philosophically thorny terrain, although its premise involves not the limits of academic integrity but the psychic wreckage of grief.