A life lived by proxy
The lives of many young people are now built around a constant search for external validation. Likes, views, emojis: a succession of immediate gratifications shaping a persona, another digital self whose only purpose is to go viral, to please, or to provoke. By endlessly staging oneself for the gaze of others, something begins to slip away.
This impoverished emotional register deserves closer attention. The whole range of human affects is compressed into a handful of standardised icons. And that reduced vocabulary also serves as a screen for violence: seemingly harmless symbols carry insults and humiliations in a code adults often fail to decipher. Digital emotional language is thus doubly altered, simplified almost to caricature in ordinary use, and diverted into an invisible weapon in malicious use.
This distancing from oneself produces a troubling form of identity disconnection. One still exists, certainly, but through a role, a digital mask, an emaciated avatar. Authenticity is weakened in the gap between the self and its image. And with it weakens the ability to think and act as a sincere and authentic being, capable of deciding for itself rather than merely reacting in order to satisfy the demands of an environment that watches and evaluates it constantly.
We are biologically primed to look for a face behind every utterance, an intention behind every answer. Generative AIs enter through that opening with formidable efficiency.
Why companion AI alters the self
The paradox is striking. Where the construction of the self once required a physical and real relation to others, in all their resistance, unpredictability, and capacity both to disappoint and to surprise, interaction with companion AIs offers an infinitely patient mirror, one without friction. The algorithm does not contradict, does not tire, does not issue ultimatums. It is available at three in the morning as it is in the middle of class. That faultless availability, which might seem benevolent, in fact deprives the subject of what it most needs in order to be formed: confrontation with reality in what it has of the irreducible.
The drift towards a life lived by proxy does not merely alter habits of communication. It alters the very structure of identity. The authentic self gives way to an adaptive construction designed to answer the expectations of the virtual environment. It becomes a pure reactive surface, incapable of desiring by itself, of feeling boredom, of dreaming without external stimulation.
What safeguards can we put in place?
Value the process rather than the result. AI is a machine for erasing effort. Yet identity, in the way it forms, requires reflection. It is by stumbling over a problem, by groping, by failing and beginning again, that a subject encounters its own resources. The pedagogical challenge is no longer to supply the right answer, which AI can provide instantly, but to document the path: abandoned hypotheses, doubts gone through, fertile dead ends.
Reintroduce long time. It is within that suspended, apparently unproductive time that a pupil has the chance to encounter themselves. Faced with algorithmic haste, silence is not an emptiness to be filled; it is a space to inhabit.
Encourage an authentic presence in the real world. The flattering mirror of companion AIs does not sweat, tremble, or feel hunger. The best safeguard against that abstraction remains the sensory and physical experience of reality: kneading, sculpting, running, planting. Identity needs to confront a reality that does not bend to its wishes through a mere prompt.
Assume one’s vulnerability. An algorithm is never vulnerable. A teacher, parent, or leader who admits doubt or error creates a space of truth that strengthens the identity of those around them. To say “I do not know”, “I was mistaken”, “I need time to think” is an act of resistance in the face of the manufactured perfection of digital tools.
Develop ethical discernment. Students must be formed not only to use AI, but to know when and why not to use it. That capacity to renounce is a powerful affirmation of human identity. Choosing not to delegate, even when one could, is a way of asserting that some tasks are worth carrying out oneself, for oneself.
Silence has become a threatened territory, colonised by notifications, suggestions and anticipated answers. To reclaim it requires a deliberate effort: stretches without screens, moments of unproductive reverie, times when one’s only company is oneself.
This is not a contemplative luxury. It is an anthropological necessity. When we no longer know how to be alone with ourselves, we lose our bearings and drift away from what we truly feel. All that remains are suggested desires, borrowed opinions and mimed emotions.
Silence as a condition of thought
Reclaiming silence is not the same as keeping quiet. It is recovering that inner space where thought can be born before it is formulated, where desire can emerge before it is suggested, where identity can take shape before it is staged. In short, it is a wager on the human.