Constitutive AI Identity Theory
TL;DR
This essay introduces constitutive artificial intelligence identity theory (CAIIT), a conceptual framework for understanding how generative artificial intelligence participates in the constitutive processes of identity formation, and proposes that identity in the age of generative AI is increasingly distributed, relational, and algorithmically entangled.
Abstract
This essay introduces constitutive artificial intelligence identity theory (CAIIT), a conceptual framework for understanding how generative artificial intelligence (AI) participates in the constitutive processes of identity formation. Through layered autoethnographic storytelling interwoven with interdisciplinary social theory, the essay explores three relational modes through which AI shapes identity: cybernetic (supportive and regulatory), cyborg (hybrid and performative), and cylon (simulative and destabilizing). These frames capture the complexity of how AI functions not merely as a communication tool but as a co-performer in the creation, regulation, and projection of selfhood. Grounded in the communication theory of identity (CTI), communication as constitutive of relationships (CCR) theorizing, affect theory, cyborg theory, and situated epistemology, the essay proposes that identity in the age of generative AI is increasingly distributed, relational, and algorithmically entangled. Through this lens, AI emerges not only as an assistant but as an identity partner—supporting cognitive and emotional regulation, enhancing relational expression, and at times unsettling notions of authorship and authenticity. CAIIT is offered as a theory in progress—an open, reflexive, and interdisciplinary attempt to articulate how humans are becoming with machines. The essay ends by calling for new ethical, methodological, and institutional paradigms that respond to the evolving role of AI in shaping not just how people communicate, but who they are becoming when they do.