The assignment the college professor gave her students was to write about their experience of the course and how they felt about it. Twelve students from vastly different cultures, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds were enrolled in the anthropology seminar, but what the professor received was a dozen iterations of essentially the same essay. Not only were the topics they covered the same: learning, growth, and concepts related to anthropology and cultural traditions. But at the same time, the essays all shared a language and structure far more sophisticated, organized, and complex compared with the language the students had used throughout the semester. Put simply, their final papers stunk of AI.

One particularly disturbing aspect of AI is that it encourages young people to look outside themselves for their own internal experience. Simultaneously, it may be preventing young people from actually developing a self at all. More and more, young people are looking for who they are, what they feel, want, and believe from the internet—Claude, ChatGPT, and other social media. The idea of turning their attention to themselves—exploring internally, has become a pointless and irrelevant venture. Young people are undeveloped as human beings, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually; they can hold information, but on their own are increasingly substanceless. Will AI eventually replace our personal selves altogether?

But it’s not just younger folks who are looking outside themselves for their internal........

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