Artificial Intelligence
Does AI Condemn Us to Be Free?
When we can create anything, how do we choose?
Updated May 5, 2026 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Key points
- Sartre famously remarked that "man is condemned to be free". What does that mean in the era of AI?
- LLMs offer a near infinite range of possibilities. And with it, an unprecedented degree of anxiety.
- Technology's potential exacerbates the tension between choice and contentment.
The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that "man is condemned to be free."
His idea was that since no higher power constricts our choices, everything is up to us. Our freedom at any given moment is infinite. In the very next second, you go out for a run around the block, look up NBA highlights, join a political party, throw your phone into the air, punch the person sitting next to you, etc. The possibilities are endless.
According to Sartre, this baffling infinitude is the source of humanity's inescapable anxiety. When you can do anything, what do you do? And while we can pick anything, we are wholly responsible for our decisions. As our freedom grows, so does our anxiety and the weight of our choices.
When we zoom out on Sartre’s worldview, he was fiercely anti-capitalist, anti-money, and felt human nature was inherently miserable. But you need not accept Sartre’s philosophy in full in order to appreciate this fundamental tension: We fiercely seek freedom of choice, but if and when we get it, it becomes a source of deep anxiety.
We can see this tension in several domains, from consumer freedom to counterfactual thinking to technological innovation. I argue that we see it most recently, in its fullest expression, in generative artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT.
The Psychology of Choice in the Modern World
The ambivalence of freedom is a perennial feature in the consumer world. Consumers say they want a wide range of products to choose from—but when brands provide this, it makes choosing burdensome. The more options consumers have, the less they tend to buy, and the less they tend to enjoy the experience if they do.
In response, the likes of Amazon, Netflix, and Airbnb have gone to great lengths to curate these options. Consumers want freedom, but when they get it, it's overwhelming. This classic phenomenon in consumer psychology, the paradox of choice, directly reflects Sartre's perspective on human freedom.
Return policies exhibit a similar psychological pattern: Consumers want a flexible return policy—but like more product options, this freedom can lead to discontent. When you can always just send something back, you enjoy it much less.
In one seminal experiment by Dan Gilbert at Harvard University, participants were presented with a series of photos and asked to select the two they liked best. Then, of those final two, they had to take one home to keep and leave the other.
One group of participants was given a flexible return policy; anytime they liked, they could return and exchange the picture for the other. But in the other group, the decision was final.
After a few weeks, they monitored how happy both groups of participants were with the picture they selected. Overwhelmingly, the people who had no choice but to live with their decisions were significantly happier with their selections.
The effects aren't limited to photographs or art. Psychologists have plied the same experimental setup with various types of goods, from chocolates to cars. The results all point to the same conclusion: The less freedom you have in making a decision, the happier you tend to be with it.
Personal Freedom and Technological Innovation
To paraphrase Sartre, not only are we "condemned to be free," but we're also condemned to crave freedom. Technological innovation reflects our ambivalence toward freedom.
We create platforms that give us access to unfathomable possibilities. YouTube hosts over 800 million videos, with 3.5 million new ones uploaded daily. You could spend a lifetime watching and never scratch the surface. And that's just YouTube; every time the internet refreshes, it brings eons of possible experiences.
Yet the freedoms we create can completely overwhelm us. Many of us feel powerless to resist these technologies. We develop practices, routines, and entire industries to push back against our own innovations, from digital detoxes to "dopamine" fasts.
The greatest example of this tension: digital possibilities haunt us even when we're not online. Research finds that the mere presence of a phone can bring down our mood. Imagine sitting across from a friend at dinner. If their phone is on the table, even face down, it cues the myriad possibilities of the digital world. What different, even better experiences could you be having? This kind of rumination, counterfactual thinking, contrasts our current experience with an imagined better one, making the present feel worse by comparison. Even the possibility of freedom can bring anxiety.
Personal Freedom in the Era of Generative AI
As technology progresses, the same tension persists with increasing intensity. The most direct way to confront it is to stare into the prompt of a generative AI platform. Whether it's text on ChatGPT or images on Midjourney, you're limited only by your imagination.
If you're a fan of Monet, you can see what a Monet-style painting of an apocalyptic Manhattan skyline would look like. Or have Jay-Z rap you a happy birthday. These technologies are in their infancy, very much in the "cool, look at this" phase. But this is only the beginning. Text-to-video technology already lets you create highly realistic video from a few simple prompts. It may not be long until we can create entire feature-length films that would otherwise take years.
People already express annoyance at sifting through Netflix's catalog. Now imagine sifting through not just all existing movies, but all potential movies. The future of technological innovation is always mysterious, but one thing is clear: it will bring an ever greater abundance of possible experiences, and with it, an ever more intense anxiety of freedom.
Connecting Personal Freedom and Human Nature
Freedom is one of the great paradoxes of human nature: we crave it, but if and when we obtain it, it makes us anxious. Our technological innovation reflects our great desire for choice and possibility, and along with it, our deep ambivalence. Generative AI has only supercharged this. Should we take these innovations to their full terminus, we'll create a system, like Alan Watts envisioned, in which every possible experience is at our fingertips. This may not be the complete utopia we might imagine, but instead, equal parts delight and anxiety.
Sartre remarked in the 1960s that, "Everything has been figured out, except how to live." How much more true has that become?
This article originally appeared on the human connection blog, NeuroScience Of
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