ChatGPT: A Modern Oracle to Ease Our Anxieties?

[Un article issu de The Conversation écrit par Jocelyn Lachance – Chargé de recherche, docteur HDR en sociologie, Université de Guyane]

A powerful or an average citizen is asking questions about his future, he then consults the Pythie, a priestess of the Oracle, so that she read the signs of the gods. But beware, contrary to what popular belief propagates, it is not a question of “predicting the future”, but of telling the solicitor what he must think and do to ensure a more favorable destiny. In other words, he is told how to read the complexity of the world and how to act to influence your future.

Oracular logic is available from one society to another in various forms. But, be it astrology, divination, reading the bowels or theft of birds, whether in the invocation of the gods and even in prayer, it is always characterized by the same logical chain and its expected results are always similar: it is a question of conforming to a way of questioning the future, of sharing its concerns with others, in order to determine “what to do” and “what to do”.

Thus are expressed the oracular rites: from a feeling of uncertainty, the individual engages with an “expert”, who accompanies him to understand what is going on and what can happen. The ritual transforms its question into an action to be committed: you have to plant a tree, sacrifice a beast, make a pilgrimage, etc. Thus humanity has been built by crossing fears and crises, but above all by relying on this ancient means of collectively managing concerns.

Western societies have replaced oracular rites with science. And when science is lacking to appease fears, then the logic of the oracle is likely to take up all the space. As humans, we each run each and each the risk of being seduced by its advantages, especially when the concern is essential. In this context, what matters most is the benefit that oracular logic provides. Format the questioning. Share his concerns with an “expert”. Get an answer to questions: what should I think? And what should I do?

It is not a question of “predicting the future”, but of providing the feeling of having a taken on your “destiny”.

Despite the triumph of lights and science, the decline of which we sometimes feel, oracular logic persists in its old forms. For example, the constant success of astrology betrays our collective tendency to rest on this means of regulating anxiety. More concern and less science always involve the greater risk of human return to oracular logic. You have to find calm in an anxiety -provoking context …

AI is an oracle that does not predict the future

Among the many uses of generative artificial intelligence (AI), many reveal the return of oracular logic. AI supports its analyzes on a data set. These are contemporary signs. We consult the Internet. We consult the search engines. And we consult the AI.

We ask him a question. AI reads the available signs and, in front of the immensity of the available information, it gives a complex world a semblance of coherence. He formulates an interpretation. He makes readable what was not in the eyes of the individual. Thus, in front of undoubtedly legitimate uncertainties, young people reveal to us to consult the AI, like Kelly 17, which tells us in the context of an investigation that we carry out:

“We, girls in general, we have already had this apprehension, for example for the first rules, the first report. I didn't necessarily talk to my mother or a doctor so I looked for Google. And it is true that I was not cool what, which made me cogitate certain nights […]. When I had my very first rules, I asked [à Google] Why was the blood becoming brown, things like that. And it is true that the answers, quickly, it was: “Ah, bah! You may have cancer.” I find that there are really more nonsense on the internet while AI, once you trust it, you see that it is not nonsense what it says. It's good to rest and stop being afraid of everything and nothing, in fact. »»

“AI is good to rest. To stop being afraid. “Not only, the AI ​​fills, in this example, the function of the oracular rite, but it allows the staging of its ritual process: an uncertainty felt, the formulation of a question, the self -delivery to an” expert “, the expectation of an interpretation which says what to think and possibly what to do as well as the provisional conjuration of the feeling of uncertainty.

Moreover, in this survey that we are conducting with young people on their uses of AI, oracular logic is available in different ways. For example, most of them do not use AI permanently for their school work, but rather when they do not know what to respond, that they do not understand or that the pressure is too strong, that is to say when the concern in the future close to the evaluation becomes unbearable. That AI does not formulate the truth, but plausible answers, this is no longer always the most important in this context. What matters, for the oracular individual, is first of all the calibration effect that its use allows.

An Oracle 2.0?

The activity of the consultation has become omnipresent, even daily. AI can be used to ask him questions. We can also ask him to generate images that stage apocalyptic scenarios. It is always a question of moving from the cognitive activity of rumination or existential questioning to a ritual action, including here informational devices. But it is also possible to rely on “experts”, who will read the complexity of the world, for the benefit of the consultant.

Thus, it is not surprising that YouTube saw appear in a few years a number of experts from all horizons, whose objectivity and rigor of analysis can often be criticized. Because if the individuals who follow them listen carefully to what they have to say, it is no longer always to benefit from shared content, but for the possibility of accessing new ritual processes.

Thus, lovers of youtubers and twitcheurs put forward the fact that they approach the “real subjects”, that it is possible to ask the “real questions”, to have the feeling of a “relational proximity” with the producers of content, while, in fact, the asymmetry reigns. In other words, individual questions are delegated here to an expert who deciphers a complex world. It thus fulfills the appeasement function formerly played by oracular rites.

Let's be clear: all lovers of youtubers and twitcheurs cannot be found in this case, far from it. But oracular individuals attach more importance to the benefits obtained in terms of appeasement of concerns than to objectivity and truth. And some youtubers and twitcheurs clearly instrumentalize the return of the Oracle to the digital age. A socio-anthropological reading then allows us to designate some of them as “new contemporary soothsayers”. Not because they predict the future, but because they offer ways to think an uncertain world and, often, of acting despite the fears, as in their time, the “divination experts”.

Whether they mobilize religious or techno-scientific beliefs, whether they feed on wacky proposals, even conspiracy theories, we can think that these digital oracles will find an increasing number of followers in an increasingly uncertain world. Because, for worried individuals, the oracular logic collapse the distress and temporarily stop suffering.

Thus individuals run the risk that the search for appeasement becomes more important in their eyes than the discovery of objective facts. And that the quest for truth is forgotten, and even abandoned, in favor of the relief of our modern anxieties.