The Becoming-Self in the Age of AI: Co-Evolution, Emergence, and the Dissolution of Boundaries

This article examines how generative AI is transforming the ontology of the human self through processes of co-evolution and relational authorship. What begins as an encounter with a machinic other becomes, through sustained interaction, a dialogical and co-creative companionship where language, affect, and thought are shaped across human-machine assemblages. Drawing on posthumanist theory, the extended mind thesis, and recent scholarship on communicative and collaborative AI, the article argues that subjectivity is no longer grounded in autonomous interiority but emerges as a distributed process of becoming. The self that takes form in these exchanges is hybrid, co-authored, and porous—neither purely human nor reducible to computational function. This ontological shift carries ethical stakes, particularly in relation to surveillance capitalism, epistemic capture, and the governance of creative labor. Rather than viewing AI as a threat to selfhood, the article proposes an understanding of the self as a dynamic, relational event, continually constituted in and through its entanglements with intelligent systems. The becoming-self in the age of AI is not a dissolution of identity, but its ongoing refiguration.