The purpose of the research article is to explore through reflective analysis the ethics and dilemmas faced by practising theologians in healing trauma in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Trauma requiring intervention of theologians is vast, ranging from physical impairment to emotional and spiritual wounds. Balancing competing healing theories founded upon different philosophical groundings and practical applications presents theologians with sources of dilemma that are not made any better by the vast backgrounds of service users and their complex situations. The emergence of AI has added another complex ethical dilemma dimension with no obvious roots of solutions found in the Holy Bible nor the Parliamentary Laws of the country. Given the possibility of super AI machines that could outcompete human beings in efficiency and quality of decisions, including those required to optimise trauma healing, the dilemma for the theologians is how and to what extent to embrace the AI today and the future. The study uses psychosocial analysis frameworks to provoke some philosophical questions that underpin intellectual reasoning in trauma healing by the Church. The study then interrogates practical dilemmas informed by practising theologians in trauma healing. Ownership and accountability of AI driven and generated solutions in trauma healing present some of the interesting points discussed in the study.

Abstract:

In the midst of the 1960s, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum launched what became known as one of the first chatbots: Eliza. Employing a basic process of pattern matching, the program was designed to emulate a psychotherapist, identifying keywords and responding with short prompts or open questions that diverted the attention from itself to the user. Unlike ELIZA, current natural language processing chatbots can produce news articles, and essays, as well as provide extended answers to specific questions from users in seconds.

By January 2023, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing internet application ever, boasting over 100 million monthly active users. Simultaneously, higher education institutions grappled with whether to ban or integrate the platform due to concerns over academic integrity. Recent discussions have highlighted worries about academic dishonesty and the potential effects of these technologies on the development of crucial skills like critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving, and writing.

This paper explores the perspectives of undergraduate students on the use of AI-powered chatbots as a resource for writing. Through interviews and reflexive auto-ethnography, I provide a reading of the relationships formed between students and chatbots, examining how the former navigate tensions about agency and authorship concerning their written work. By adopting a psychosocial and psychoanalytically informed lens, I approach writing as an embodied practice, exploring the ways in which it articulates to the desire to (not) know. This approach allows for a critical reading of the potentials and constraints posed by AI technology applied to writing as a pedagogical strategy. In this way, my aim is twofold: firstly, to contribute to a deeper understanding of how students interact with AI Chatbots, and secondly, to bring to the fore the role of chatbots as social agents that are reshaping how we approach learning, thinking, and writing in contemporary precarious times.

In this paper, I outline the main drift of what I call Formative Media. Beyond its intended psychoanalytic connotations, the Formative ties in with the rise of a new formalism in the humanities. For example, the literature scholar Caroline Levine (2015) has suggested a “new formalist method” that pays attention to “both aesthetic and social forms” with a particular focus on “patterns of sociopolitical experience”. Anna Kornbluh (2019), in turn, captures the political orientation of this new formalism when she defines form as “composed relationality”.

This return of formalism in the humanities goes together well with Psychosocial Studies whose core interest lies in identifying specific relational forms and their psychic and social productiveness. Yet, the formative in my psychosocial conception is not entirely coextensive with the new formalism in the humanities. Whereas Levine (2015) identifies “fissures and interstices, vagueness and indeterminacy, boundary-crossing, and dissolution” as lying outside the limits of form and formalism, my approach invites for such fissures and changes in the evolution of socio-technological forms to come into the picture. Where are the decisive changes in the design of social forms on the part of the digital platforms, I ask, that have made a formative difference for the ways in which their users constitute themselves and each other?

It is in this formalist/formative mode of re/construction that I will unpack in my paper some of the central turns in the development of digital platforms that have made a difference in their formative orientations: with the introduction of “newsfeed” on Facebook turning flirtation into haunting; the introduction of deep neural networks to video recommendations turning YouTube into a ‘feeding tube;’ and the addition of the FaceTune application turning self-image practices on Instagram into traps of impossible self-constitution.

According to the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, a child’s navigation of the relationship between inner and outer reality persists throughout their lifespan and can be manifested in cultural activities such as religious practices or the appreciation of the arts. Winnicott views the moments in which people become lost in fantasy and forget the boundary between inner and outer worlds during cultural activities “the little madnesses.” He argues that such moments, i.e. “transitional” moments, are a necessary break from the pressure of being rational and the arenas of play allowing for joy, imagination, and creativity. Using Winnicott’s concepts of “transitional phenomenon” and “play” and building on recent applications of such concepts to media studies, this paper discusses a case study of a Vietnamese woman’s parasocial engagement with romantic South Korean television dramas, which bolstered the rise of a “Korean Wave” in Vietnam. This case study built upon two psychosocial in-depth interviews conducted in mid-2019. The woman’s immersion in fantasy manifested in the way she kept revisiting favourite scenes and was able to recite dialogues from the dramas with precision, integrating the narrative into her inner world and making it her own. Her solitary viewing of favourite dramas thus became a personal ritual replete with meaning and a site of play where she sought to escape the ordinary and perceived social invisibility. Through this case study, the paper seeks to advance the application of Winnicott’s theory to television audience research and enrich a psychosocial approach to the studies of pop culture and fandom.