Is Artificial Intelligence a Friend or Foe? It Depends
Concerns have emerged regarding how artificial intelligence (AI) will change who we are and what we do. Like most powerful forces in human history, AI is capable of promoting or eroding health and well-being. The true gift of AI resides not in the answers it provides.
There seems to be growing concern as to how AI will change our lives and possibly even who we are psychologically as well as biologically. Some suggest it will rob us of our humanity by fostering passive consumption of and over-dependence upon AI-generated information. Others suggest, similar to the Industrial Revolution, AI will relieve us of many of the burdens that plague us. They assert AI has the potential to bring out the best in us—to make us more human.
Currently, AI does not originate thought or knowledge independently of retrieved data. Rather, it produces outputs through varying degrees of data recall and novel recombination of learned patterns or other forms of information. Even so-called novel outputs from AI are necessarily built upon previously acquired information, even when the specific output itself has never existed before. Think of that as what I have previously referred to as recombinant AI (Psychology Today, April 9, 2026). The inherent weakness in such an approach is that AI does not possess the ability to independently assess the validity of the data it retrieves nor its recombinant output. As such, it may provide misleading or erroneous information. So, if you are looking to AI for all the answers, be forewarned.
The Risk of Passive Consumption
From a public health perspective, more problematic than potentially erroneous output, AI may encourage passive consumption of information. The risks of AI-associated passive consumption have yet to be determined. That said, there is concern that consistent use and reliance upon AI may lead to inhibition of critical thinking, creation of a functional dependence, potential contributions to depression and isolation, and even the potential for undesirable changes in brain morphology. Such outcomes have been associated with excessive social media use (Montag & Becker, 2023; Shensa, et al., 2018), thus concerns have generalized to AI.
The Greatest Potential of AI?
Rather than relying upon AI for answers, perhaps the greatest potential of AI, psychologically speaking, may reside in the questions it can ask rather than the answers it may provide. Through the use of questions, AI has the potential to challenge us to develop our critical thinking skills, to encourage empathy and perspective-taking, and to foster greater psychological and biological resilience.
To begin, even in its present form, AI appears to be capable of using active listening techniques to foster a therapeutic alliance consisting of a sense of connection (being heard), empathy (being understood), and cathartic ventilation (Malouin-Lachance, et al, 2025). Psychologist Carl Rogers asserted these elements are the necessary and sufficient conditions for self-improvement and therapeutic change. The net effects could be the conveyance of self-worth, optimism, and even self-efficacy.
How It Works
Roughly 2000 years ago during the Golden Age of Greece, Socrates sought to encourage the pursuit of virtue and wisdom. As the greatest teacher of his era, he nurtured those who would become the most influential philosophers of their time. Counterintuitively, he employed challenging questions, not answers, in his pedagogy. Perhaps consistent with the teachings of Confucius, Socrates believed the highest form of wisdom arose from introspection and self-reflection. The challenge of questions can foster both introspection and self-reflection.
Fast forward to the modern age of neuroscience, we see that questions, especially contemplative open-ended questions possess a unique power. Open-ended questions recruit diverse neural networks across both hemispheres. More specifically, the left hemisphere’s analytical reasoning is potentially linked to the right hemisphere’s integrative contextual awareness potentiating increased cognitive flexibility, emotional regulation, creativity and resilience (Southwick & Charney, 2018). The most creative and resilient brains may be those that engage numerous and diverse integrated inter-hemispheric brain regions. The gateway to such an amazing symphony of creativity and resilience may reside in contemplative questions. AI seems capable of being the conductor of that symphony.
So, is AI a friend or a foe? Over-reliance upon AI to answer all of our questions has the potential to open Pandora’s Box. So, rather than look to AI for all the right answers, look to AI for the right questions. AI may be able to help us get from where we are to where we want to be through the development of self-reliance. Questions allow us to look beyond ourselves and dream, but more importantly they allow us to look inside ourselves and awaken abilities we may not have known we have. AI can help us be what AI itself cannot. Perhaps AI can help us be more “human.”
The answer appears to be, “It depends.” As with all powerful forces in human history, AI is capable of promoting or eroding health and well-being. The true gift of AI resides not in the answers it provides, but in the questions it can ask.
