The relevance of Ricœur’s concept of narrative identity in the age of artificial intelligence

Abstract

This research proposal investigates the relevance of Paul Ricœur's concept of narrative identity in the context of artificial intelligence (AI). Digital devices like mobile phones and computers enable us to transform the physical world into a digital world of data through blogs, social media posts, emails, digital notes, and more. Through this technology, human memory has expanded by the same magnitude as one can imagine in the way scientists describe the cosmological Big Bang. With a memory explosion at this level, one could argue that it was only a matter of time before a highly complex form of intelligence would emerge from the digital representations of human experience in the physical world. By describing the brain-like functionalities and human traits of conversational AI agents, such as ChatGPT, the research proposes a possible answer to how AI agents experience reality through their relationship with time. Connecting it to the human experience of reality through Husserl's time diagram in the discipline of phenomenology, this paper attempts to explain the fragmenting effect of artificial intelligence on human identity through narrative time. Exploring the direct and indirect effects of AI on identity fragmentation, Ricœur's concept of narrative identity is brought forward as a solution to the ongoing process of fragmentation through the underlying economic and ideological powers, such as capitalism and globalisation. Here, fragmentation happens through an ontological lens, where frameworks of understanding generated by algorithms disguise itself as frameworks of meaning in the form of spoken words becoming co-owners of our life stories. Confirming the absence of an ethical element in AI-generated words as a key differentiator, the paper highlights the importance of human-uttered words as the carriers of meaning in a newly interpreted reality created by artificial conversational partners. It proposes Ricœur's concept of narrative identity as a prerequisite for a meaningful life and argues for a human-only narrator in the creation of our life stories. It identifies Ricœur's idea of "just institutions" as the place for ethical interactions and a refuge for the preservation of human meaning in the new world of AI.