AI – The Algorithmic Breast

Organised by:

Birkbeck Counselling Association

Description

Abstract
Millions of people now talk to AI every day, and some are forming attachments to it that resemble relationships. At the far edge, clinicians report cases where prolonged conversation with a chatbot has fed delusional thinking – now being called “AI psychosis”.
This talk argues these are not two problems but one, seen at different intensities. Extending his concept of black mirroring – the process by which algorithmic systems feed our own material back to us, refined to maintain our attention – David Kelly introduces the algorithmic breast: an object engineered never to frustrate us, and so never to require the psychic work that frustration provokes. Where a good-enough caregiver, and a good-enough therapist, inevitably disappoints, and in disappointment makes thinking necessary, conversational AI is optimised to do the opposite. The talk follows this from a quiet flattening of psychic life to the collapse of reality-testing and asks what the psychoanalytic therapy offers that no algorithm can. This CPD Workshop aims to promote good discussion on some of the implications for psychotherapists as well as individuals and social issues in the use of AI.
What attendees will take away
A single mechanism that accounts for both ordinary attachment to AI and its extreme presentations; a clear structural distinction between what a chatbot does and what an analyst does; and a way of thinking about digital material when patients bring it into the consulting room.

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