Reflections on the Abyss

How Generative AI mirrors humanity's collective unconscious. A reflection on opportunities and existential risks from three real life stories.

A curious child eager to learn how cars are made with chatGPT; a depressed teenager who ends his life after saying goodbye to the Character.AI bot he had fallen in love with; a university student seeking help from Gemini to complete his tests, but ending up attacked by it.

Three different stories that reveal how people are interacting with generative artificial intelligence today. Three stories that highlights the beautiful opportunities of such tools, and the existential risks they pose. Through these stories, I want to share some personal reflections on the nature of this new technology and the role it is assuming in our lives.

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Just stochastic parrots?

Generative artificial intelligences do not see, think, or feel: many argue that they are nothing more than stochastic parrots, technological toys that produce responses based on statistical models, devoid of any real understanding of what they are doing. They lack consciousness, emotions, or a psyche. And yet, when we interact with them, something extraordinary happens: these AIs respond coherently to our questions and even appear to comprehend what we are asking.

In fact, “understanding” means integrating, connecting, and organizing information in a coherent manner. According to neuroscientist Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, coherence forms the foundation of consciousness: a system capable of unifying large amounts of data into an interconnected and coherent structure can develop a form of consciousness and awareness.

Generative AI, while far from true human-like understanding, seems to take a first step toward this internal coherence when it produces responses that reflect our mental order and coherence—albeit limited to the specific and temporary context of its interaction with humans.

Regardless, even without consciousness, generative artificial intelligences are becoming integral nodes in a cybernetic network connecting humans and machines. Each interaction creates a feedback loop: we provide an input, they respond, and their response alters our subsequent inputs.

Generative artificial intelligence thus represents a system capable of reflecting and amplifying our consciousness, drawing from our collective unconscious: a node in the global cybernetic network that increasingly connects humans and machines, generating feedback cycles that pave the way toward a new evolutionary paradigm.

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An artificial lake

To better explain what I mean, let me use a metaphor.

Imagine standing before a vast, boundless lake. Its water is pitch-black and so still it appears lifeless, almost alien. Even if you were to immerse yourself in it, you couldn’t see beneath the surface: what lies in its depths remains mysterious and unknowable.

The water mass simultaneously represents the data lake—a repository of trillions of fragmented pieces of data from which neural networks draw—and the AI itself. The lake embodies the infinite, chaotic, fluid, and incoherent potential of the human collective unconscious, transformed into a digital database. As Carl Jung wrote in Man and His Symbols: "Water is the most common symbol of the unconscious. The lake, the sea, or the ocean represent the collective unconscious, with its unexplored depths and hidden treasures, but also the dangers it can harbor."