Sartre warned us about ChatGPT and Modern Consumer Freedom
The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that "man is condemned to be free"
His idea was that since no higher power constricts our choices, everything is up to us. Our freedom at any given moment, is infinite. In the very next second, you go out for a run around the block, look up NBA highlights, join a political party, could throw your phone into the air, punch the person sitting next to you, etc. The possibilities are endless.
According to Sartre, this baffling infinitude is the source of humanity's inescapable anxiety. When you can do anything, what do you do? And while we can pick anything, we are wholly responsible for our decisions. As our freedom grows, so do our anxiety and the weight of our choices.
When we zoom out on Sartre’s worldview, he was fiercely anti-capitalist, anti-money, and felt human nature was inherently miserable. But you need not accept Sartre’s philosophy in full in order to appreciate this fundamental tension: We fiercely seek freedom of choice, but if and when we get it, it becomes a source of deep anxiety.
We can see this tension in several domains, from consumer freedom to counterfactual thinking to technological innovation. And we see it most recently, in its fullest expression in generative artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT.
Freedom in the Modern Consumer World
The ambivalence of freedom is a perennial feature in the consumer world. Consumers want a wide range of products to choose from, but when brands provide this, it makes choosing burdensome. The more options consumers have, the less they tend to buy, and the less they tend to enjoy the experience if they do.
In response, the likes of Amazon, Netflix, Airbnb, etc., have gone to great lengths to triage these options through personal curation. Consumers want freedom, but when they get it, it's overwhelming. This classic phenomenon in consumer psychology, the paradox of choice, directly reflects Sartre's perspective on human freedom.
Return policies exhibit a similar psychological pattern: Consumers want a flexible return policy, but like product options, this freedom causes discontent. When you can always just something back, you enjoy it much less.
In one seminal experiment by Dan Gilbert at Harvard University, participants were presented with a series of photos and asked to select the two they liked best. Then, of those final two, they had to take one home to keep and leave the other. One group of participants was given a flexible return policy: anytime they liked, they could return and exchange the picture for the other. But in the other group, the decision was final.
After a few weeks, they monitored how happy both groups of participants were with the picture they selected. Overwhelmingly, the people who had no choice but to live with their decisions were significantly happier with their selections.
The effects aren't limited to photographs or art. Psychologists have plied the same experimental setup with various types of goods, from chocolates to cars. The results all point to the same conclusion: you're happier with your decision, the less freedom you have in making it.
Personal Freedom and Technological Innovation
To paraphrase Sartre, not only are we "condemned to be free", but we're also condemned to crave freedom. Technological innovation reflects our ambivalence with freedom.
We create platforms that give us access to unfathomable possibilities. For example, YouTube hosts over 800 million videos, with 3.5 million new videos uploaded daily. You could spend a lifetime watching clips and couldn't scratch the surface of even a day's worth of uploads. And that's just YouTube; every refresh time the internet refreshes, it brings eons of possible experiences.
Our technology provides us with innumerable possibilities. At the same time, the freedoms we create completely overwhelm us. We get sucked in and become addicted to these technologies. We develop practices, routines, and entire industries to resist our own innovations. We unplug, undergo digital detox, and embark on "dopamine" fasts.
The greatest example of this tension is the observation that these digital possibilities haunt us, even when we're not online. Research finds that the mere presence of a phone brings down our mood and detracts from our experience.
Imagine sitting across from a friend at a dinner. If they have their phone at the table, even facedown, it serves as a cue for the myriad possibilities of the digital world. Sure, hearing your friend's drama at work is interesting. But what about those other things happening on the other side of that phone? What different, even better experiences could you be having?
This kind of rumination is called counterfactual thinking, and it’s a common companion to modern technology. It's one of the primary mechanisms that help explain the perils of abundant choice. When we engage in it, it contrasts our current experience with an even better experience, making the present feel much worse by comparison. Just as with social comparison, it's the "if only" story that plagues our happiness in the present.
Even the possibility of freedom can bring anxiety.
Personal Freedom in The Era of Generative AI and ChatGPT
As technology progresses, the same fundamental tension persists, but with increasing intensity. In the modern era, the most direct way to confront this tension is to stare into the prompt of a generative AI platform. Whether it's text on ChatGPT, or images on DALL-E or Midjourney, you're only limited by your imagination. Sartre would have had strong opinions about the challenge of connecting with this realistic, high-quality media. But most relevant for the current conversation is the freedom that comes from the democratization of these technologies.
If you're a fan of Monet's art, you can easily see what a Monet-style painting of an apocalyptic Manhattan skyline would look like. Or have Jay-Z and Drake rap you a happy birthday. And, of course, if the thought ever entered your mind, why not see what the pope looks like in a Balenciaga puff jacket? Any whimsical thought can become real.
As of 2023, these technologies are in their infancy. They're very much in the "cool, look at this stage" phase of their development. But in all likelihood, this is only the beginning.
As just one example, consider the advancement of text-to-video technology. With a few simple prompts, you can create a highly realistic video. It may not be much longer until we have the power to create entire feature-length films for ourselves and others that would otherwise take years.
Modern consumers are spoiled for choice. People already express annoyance at sifting through Netflix's current catalog of titles. Now imagine not only sifting through all existing movies, but all potential movies. The future of technological innovation is always mysterious, but one thing is clear: it will bring an ever greater abundance of possible experiences, and with it, an ever more intense anxiety of freedom.
Connecting Personal Freedom and Human Nature
Freedom is one of the great paradoxes of human nature: We crave it, but if and when we obtain it, it make us anxious. This feature of ours - the ambivalence of freedom- is neither good nor bad. On the contrary, Sartre would argue that its part and parcel of the human experience.
Our technological innovation reflects our great desire for choice and possibility, and along with it, our deep ambivalence. Generative AI and the likes of ChatGPT has only supercharged this. As a result, the digital world already has more experiences than we could hope to consume in a thousand lifetimes. And now, Generative AI has given each of us the power to create our own digital world of possibilities.
The quality and sophistication of these generative outputs get better every day. Should we take these innovations to their full terminus, we'll create a system, like Alan Watts envisioned, in which every possible experience is at our fingertips. This may not be the complete utopia we might imagine, but instead, equal parts delight and anxiety.
Sartre remarked in the 1960s that, "Everything has been figured out, except how to live." How much more true has that become?
Photo by Matt Johnson via DALL-E
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
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