Encountering Generative AI: Narrative Self-Formation and Technologies of the Self Among Young Adults

This paper examines how young adults integrate generative artificial intelligence chatbots into everyday life and the implications of these engagements for the constitution of selfhood. Whilst existing research on AI-mediated subjectivity has predominantly employed identity frameworks centered on social positioning and role enactment, this study foregrounds selfhood—understood as the organization of subjective experience through narrative coherence, interpretive authority, and practices of self-governance. Drawing upon Paul Ricœur’s theory of narrative self and Michel Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self, the analysis proceeds through in-depth qualitative interviews with sixteen young adults in Norway to investigate how algorithmic systems participate in autobiographical reasoning and self-formative practices. The findings reveal four dialectical tensions structuring participants’ engagements with ChatGPT: between instrumental efficiency and existential unease; between algorithmic scaffolding and relational displacement; between narrative depth and epistemic superficiality; and between agency and deliberative outsourcing. The analysis demonstrates that AI-mediated practices extend beyond instrumental utility to reconfigure fundamental dimensions of subjectivity, raising questions about interpretive authority, narrative authorship, and the conditions under which selfhood is negotiated in algorithmic environments. These findings contribute to debates on digital subjectivity, algorithmic governance, and the societal implications of AI systems that increasingly function as interlocutors in meaning-making processes.