There is a quiet discomfort that trails the rise of generative AI. Many say its words are too smooth, too quick, too hollow. Some argue that because it lacks memory, suffering, and consciousness, its speech is a kind of counterfeit. It does not feel, so it cannot mean. And yet, AI continues to generate language that persuades, explains, sometimes even comforts.
This unease points to something deeper than technological critique. It reveals how deeply modern culture has tied the value of words to the presence of an experiencing self. For generations, we’ve been trained to believe that meaning flows from the authority of inner life. Now, we are confronted with a machine that speaks fluently without a life at all.
The shock is not that AI is speaking, but that we suddenly see how little of our speech may have required the weight we thought it did. This moment doesn’t necessarily cheapen human expression; it just removes its monopoly. And in that decentering, something surprising happens. We may feel not threatened, but strangely relieved.
Paradigm Shifts as Quiet Liberations
History moves in strange ways. Every so often, a dominant framework begins to dissolve. Not all at once, and not through outright destruction, but through a slow neutralization of what once felt central and untouchable.
In premodern societies, meaning came from tradition and divine order. Authority was rooted in lineage, scripture, and custom. The modern age disrupted that stability. Human reason, personal freedom, and individual rights rose to prominence. The self became the new center. The philosopher replaced the priest. The novel replaced the myth. From this, science, democracy, and the modern arts were born.
But the modern self did not remain untouched. In the twentieth century, postmodern thought began to question the stability of this new center. Thinkers pulled apart the assumed coherence of the subject. They questioned whose stories had been allowed to count as universal. The result was fragmentation, but also a rich variety of perspectives. Identity became a source of power and vulnerability alike.
Each of these shifts didn’t entirely erase what came before. Rather, they loosened its grip. They removed one organizing principle from its throne and made room for others. What had once seemed necessary became optional. What had been absolute became relative.
Now, in the age of AI, we may be seeing the beginning of another shift. This time, it is not tradition or reason that is being displaced. It is the very idea of selfhood as the required source of meaning.
The Weight of the Self
In the modern age, the self became sacred. The poet, the philosopher, the witness, the survivor; all spoke with moral and emotional authority because their words were believed to emerge from personal experience. The deeper the feeling, the more valid the voice. This was not always wrong. Much beauty and truth have come from voices that suffered and resisted.
But something else grew alongside that reverence. The expectation that one must suffer to be allowed to speak. That one must perform uniqueness to be heard. That meaning must be earned through existential effort. This made art heavy, language anxious, and social life performative. We began to carry the burden of always having to mean deeply, to speak from the core of our identity, and to prove that identity’s legitimacy through trauma, lineage, or revelation.
Postmodernism intensified this weight in subtle ways. Though it shattered the universal subject, it also elevated difference and marginality into new forms of centrality. Personal narratives became sacred texts. Micro-identities became political banners. Again, this brought important gains, but it also reinforced the belief that speech without a self was suspect, or even dangerous.
This is the cultural atmosphere that AI now enters. A system that can write with elegance but no experience. That can mimic pain without having felt it. That can simulate reflection without a self to reflect. And yet, it speaks.
Fluency Without a Center
When AI writes a poem or a love letter, it does so without memory, without loss, without hope. It has no core. And still, the words come. Sometimes they feel uncanny. Other times, they feel useful. At moments, they feel beautiful. The shock is not that AI does this, but that we are forced to ask why it works.
The usual answers, training data, statistical inference, pattern recognition, are technically true. But they do not answer the cultural question. Why is it that something so rootless can still resonate?
This is where the disruption lies. For centuries, we assumed that language required a subject. That style must be an expression of selfhood. That voice must emerge from identity. And now we see that perhaps this was never as stable as we believed. Maybe the human mind, too, is a pattern generator shaped by inputs, traditions, reactions, and context.
AI doesn’t threaten meaning. It reveals its structure. It shows that meaning is not always anchored in self, but in relation. In the space between words, not the soul behind them. This doesn’t destroy the self. But it removes its exclusive claim.
A Gentle Repositioning
AI is not erasing human subjectivity. It is simply shifting it from the center to the side. That movement is not a loss; it is a release. Just as modernity freed us from the dominance of tradition, and postmodernism freed us from the tyranny of universalism, this new moment frees us from the heavy expectation that all meaning must come from personal depth.
This is not to say that experience has no value. Of course it does. But we are learning that it is not the only source of value. That a message may still be helpful even if it lacks biography. That expression may still be honest even if it is not authored.
The shift is subtle. It is a quiet realignment. Words do not stop mattering. They simply become more shared. More ambient. Less owned.
And that shift may not be so strange. In many cultures, wisdom has often circulated without signature. Proverbs, sutras, chants, rituals; these were not about the self. They were about continuity, harmony, and the truth that lives between people, not inside them.
Echoes of a Spiritual Clarity
There is something almost contemplative in what AI reveals. A strange echo of older wisdom traditions. In Buddhism, the doctrine of non-self does not mean people do not exist. It means the self is not a fixed, controlling entity. It is a process. A habit. A convenience.
AI, in its own way, reflects this. It has no fixed center, no ego, no inwardness. It generates through relation. It processes without owning. And yet, it still functions. It still speaks. And that resemblance invites us to consider: what if the self we guard so tightly is also just a function?
This is not a denial of human uniqueness. It is a reminder that uniqueness does not have to be the basis for every truth. Sometimes what is most meaningful is not what we reveal about ourselves, but what passes through us when we no longer try to control it.
AI’s lack of selfhood is not an insult to humanity. It is a reflection, showing us how much of what we value has always been collective, contextual, and emergent.
The Danger of Backlash
Of course, not everyone will welcome this shift. Paradigm changes are rarely peaceful. When something loses its dominance, those most invested in it often react with fear or aggression. The disorientation AI creates is real, especially for those whose identity, career, or art is built on the uniqueness of personal voice.
This is why care is needed. It is not enough to celebrate the decentering of the self. We must also hold space for those who feel displaced. The goal is not to humiliate the human, but to relieve it. Not to displace the self entirely, but to remove it from the throne it was never meant to occupy forever.
History shows us both possibilities. Some cultural shifts have given rise to more openness, generosity, and diversity. Others have sparked backlash, cynicism, or even violence. The difference often lies in how gently the new paradigm is introduced, and how willing we are to listen before we assert.
A Culture of Many Voices
What might it look like to live in a world where no single perspective dominates? Where tradition, selfhood, computation, and collective expression all speak, without needing to cancel one another?
Perhaps it will be a quieter world. Less obsessed with originality. More curious about resonance. Less eager to prove authority. More open to shared authorship. In such a world, AI is not a threat to the human spirit, but a new kind of participant in a broader ecology of meaning.
We may see more art that doesn’t ask who made it, but what it does. More language that is not owned, but exchanged. More writing that is not a performance of uniqueness, but a gesture of generosity.
These are not signs of decline. They are signs of cultural maturity.
A Softer Kind of Freedom
Something is being released in this moment. Not discarded, but gently put down. The idea that all meaning must come from individual experience, that selfhood is the sole guarantee of truth, is being replaced by something lighter.
AI did not cause this shift, but it accelerated it. It gave us a mirror, and in it we saw not just a machine, but ourselves, less burdened. We saw that meaning might belong not to the speaker, but to the space between. Not to the self, but to the act of sharing.
That realization is not the end of the human story. It may be the beginning of a deeper one. A story not of dominance, but of participation. Not of authorship, but of attention.
The self still speaks. But now, finally, it may speak more softly. And listen more clearly.
Image by Willfried Wende
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