I see us becoming more and more standardized, with a progressive loss of individuality. If we keep interacting with the same mirror, we’ll keep receiving back an image we’ll want to be coherent with. So we’ll strive to align ourselves with it. We’ll eventually become that reflection and convince ourselves that’s who we are.
Our identities will flatten, losing parts of our personality that made us us. We’ll get used to the comfort of agreeing to what we’re presented with. But when we stop engaging and succumb to the peace of not having to struggle, we risk dissolving. Left completely on its own, everything tends toward entropy. A cell can’t survive without its boundary. Strip it of its membrane and it can no longer regulate what enters and what leaves, no longer hold a difference between inside and outside. Its gradients collapse and it falls apart.
Or perhaps we’ll bounce back. We’ll sense the loss and fight to reclaim what makes us feel human: a stance that diverges, taste that can’t be explained, the courage to be strange in ways that don’t optimize for anything. But individuality has a cost. Defending who we are takes effort, and effort takes time. That effort is what the model removes when it promises to save us time.
Conformity has become cheaper and easier. Meanwhile, the price of divergence has stayed the same: isolation. The feeling of not belonging is what tempts us to crawl back into the system we’d just rejected; or to find a new group that rejects the status quo, where we can conform all over again.
The people who use AI to deepen their individuality are, disproportionately, the people who already had the resources and the permission to be unusual. For everyone else, believing what the mirror reflects back is the path of least resistance, and the one that leads back to a sense of belonging.
Both outcomes will happen, to different people and often to the same person. And losing ourselves will feel like we simply changed our minds.