Grief in the AI Age

 I want to talk about this moment in time, this AI era, through the lens of grief. Grief is a powerful response to loss. When we think about grief, we often think about death, but it’s taken me a long time to understand that we grieve all sorts of non-death loss: relationships, community, home, money, dreams, expectations, identity, sense of purpose, and even the loss of ideals or ideas.

It’s taken a ton of time and a hell of a lot of work to understand my own grief as I’ve recovered from my many and varied traumas over the years. I’ve also learned a ton about grief from my wife, Melissa, who through her journey to become a professional counselor has worked in hospice and other really challenging environments involving grief, death, and loss. It’s through my own experience and awareness of grief that I start noticing it in other places.

AI and the 5 Stages of Grief

The explosion of AI onto the scene has caused a shock to the system has triggered a real grief response for many people —myself included. I see it in the conversations I have, and of course with the abundant opinions about it I see online.

The Five Stages of Grief, also called the Kübler-Ross model, are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I want to run through each one of these five stages through the lens of how you might be feeling about AI right now.

1. Stage 1: Denial – This is certainly something that I went through, especially when AI was still generating images with seven fingers and laughable code results. It was easy to dismiss it and just push it away. I still see this with a ton of people saying, “Ha, look at how crappy it is! Look at how many mistakes it makes!” to dismiss it entirely, effectively pushing it away so as not to confront it.
2. Stage 2: Anger – When we realize that denial isn’t viable anymore, we get frustrated and start looking around to find someone to blame and take our anger out on. I feel this myself a lot, and think about this stage when I see a lot of commentary levied at the people making this technology, inflicting it on all of us with seeming reckless abandon. We get angry the many real and potential harms & risks. These feelings are certainly valid, and a lot of that anger is real and justifiable. But it’s also hard because we tend to take this anger out on the people around us.
3. Stage 3: Bargaining – Here is where we say “I’ll use AI for this little thing, but not for these other bigger things. It’s never going to touch my production code.” Here we’re trying to negotiate our complex feelings around AI; we’re still angry and in denial in many respects, but we’re also beginning to understand that it’s here or maybe isn’t entirely bad. We feel confused and are trying to make sense of it all.
4. Stage 4: Depression – I see this a lot in many of the conversations that I have with professional designers and developers. They say something along the lines of, “What’s my entire career been for if these things could just come in and generate a website in a couple seconds?” “Nothing really matters anymore. What does craft mean? What does judgment mean?” “We’re all screwed; we might as well just pack it up and then go live in an underground bunker.” Again, those feelings come as a natural response to pouring your heart and soul into something and feeling a real sense of loss: a loss of stability, a loss of identity, a loss of livelihood, a loss of a lot of things. That depression is real.
5. Stage 5: Acceptance – Acceptance is really misunderstood because acceptance can be misinterpreted as, “Oh, suddenly I’m cool with all of the downsides, all of the harms, all of the risks around this technology.” When someone we love dies, this acceptance stage is ultimately where we understand that person isn’t coming back but you ultimately can make some form of peace with it.
   
   Acceptance doesn’t mean that you no longer get sad or you no longer are angry that they’re gone. It just means that you accept the fact that the loss has happened and that you’re able to move forward with resolve. You can convert a lot of that grief into real commitment to live your life in a way that honors their memory and hopefully continues to make them proud.

Grief Is Personal and Isn’t Linear

I think I went through my own stages of grief around AI a bit sooner just because my circumstances had me working with it a little earlier. I distinctly remember many conversations “Screw all this stuff, this sucks.” But I’m also realizing that a lot of my grief training at a personal level has really helped me be able to navigate this moment with a better sense of clarity and understanding that I otherwise might not have had, had I not gone through a lot of that hard. Silver linings.

These five stages of grief come with a lot of caveats. Grief isn’t a linear process. Every single day, we might feel depressed, angry, in denial, bargaining, or we might be in a state of acceptance. This isn’t a linear step-by-step process that everyone goes through cleanly or on a uniform timeline. It’s a useful tool to help us reflect on how we feel.

Striving for Acceptance & Commitment

So here’s a little reflection for you with respect to your feelings about AI. Which stage of grief do you feel you’re currently in: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, or acceptance?

Once again, it’s important to stress that getting to acceptance doesn’t mean that you’re never also angry or depressed. It’s just an acknowledgment that AI is here; it’s a reality. And with that acceptance comes another real important word: commitment.

Acceptance and commitment therapy is a whole thing worth exploring. With acceptance, with the acknowledgment that AI is here, it’s likely not going away, despite my feelings and my grief around it. Making peace with that fact allows us to commit to doing our part to make sure that we’re putting good things out into the world. We’re able to do our part to ensure that it’s wielded in a safe and responsible way, and that we can do our part to move towards betterment rather than shittiness.

Just to underscore this once again, getting to this place doesn’t mean that you also aren’t still pissed off, you also aren’t worried, you also aren’t anxious, you also aren’t depressed. It’s a real willingness to address this reality head-on and realize that we are in a place of agency and empowerment, and that we can move forward with resolve and try to make the world a better place.

In Summary

• Grief is a powerful response to loss.
• We grieve things other than death like the loss of relationships, identity, sense of purpose, health, money, home, dreams, expectations, community, and even ideas and ideals.
• These shocks to our system can elicit a really powerful response that are captured in these five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
• These stages are really just labels and are not a rigid or linear process; everyone ebbs and flows in and out of each of these stages at any given moment.
• While these stages can be helpful descriptors, it’s important to not fixate on them or feel like there’s anything wrong with you if you’re not further along in the stages of grief. We are complex emotional creatures and our emotional states change over time.

I hope you keep this in mind, and remember to go easy on yourself. Go easy on each other. Know that everyone’s in their own place in feeling and processing this complex moment in time. And the best thing we could do is to be kind to one another and support one another.