HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Work, Employment and Organizations
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1614473
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Impact of Intelligent Technologies on the Future of Work: Challenges and Opportunities for Individuals, Organizations, and SocietyView all 3 articles
The Presentation of Self in the Age of ChatGPT
Provisionally accepted- 1University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany
- 2Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
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Contemporary debates about artificial intelligence (AI) still treat automation as a straightforward substitution of human labour by machines. Drawing on Erving Goffman's dramaturgical sociology, this paper reframes AI in the workplace as supplementary rather than substitutive automation. We argue that the central-but routinely overlooked-terrain of struggle is symbolic-interactional: workers continuously stage, conceal, and re-negotiate what counts as "real" work and professional competence. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT exemplify this dynamic. They quietly take over the invisible, routinised tasks that underpin cognitive occupations (editing, summarising, first-draft production) while leaving humans to enact the highly visible or relational facets that sustain occupational prestige. Drawing on diverse sources to illustrate our theoretical argument, we show how individual workers, dramaturgical teams, and entire professional fields manage impressions of expertise in order to counter status threats, renegotiate fees, or obscure the extent of AI assistance. The paper itself, having been intentionally written with the 'aid' of all presently available frontier AI models, serves as a meta-reflexive performance of professional self-staging. The dramaturgical framework clarifies why utopian tales of friction-free augmentation and dystopian narratives of total displacement both misread how automation is actually unfolding. By foregrounding visibility, obfuscation, and impression management, the article presents a differentiated case for AI's impact on the performative structure of work, outlines diagnostic tools for assessing real-world AI exposure beyond hype-driven headlines, and argues for a more human-centred basis for evaluating policy responses to the 'fourth industrial revolution.' In short, AI enters the labour process not as an autonomous actor, but as a prop within an ongoing social performance-one whose scripts, stages, and audiences remain irreducibly human.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, Workplace automation, dramaturgy, impression management, Goffman
Received: 18 Apr 2025; Accepted: 04 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Klowait and Erofeeva. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nils Klowait, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany
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