AIaaE: Artificial Intelligence as an Experience

Contemporary artificial intelligence research and deployment have primarily emphasized task optimization, efficiency, and information processing. While these objectives remain im- portant, they fail to capture an increasingly dominant mode of human-AI interaction: the shaping of human experience. This paper introduces AI-as-an-Experience (AIaaE) as a high- level conceptual paradigm in which artificial intelligence systems are explicitly designed to generate, guide, and sustain human experiences, particularly emotional, psychological, and narrative experiences. The paper formalizes the core concept of AIaaE, situates it within established theories from psychology and human behavior, explains why such a paradigm is becoming inevitable, and examines its long-term societal, ethical, and technological impli- cations. The central claim is that artificial intelligence can be used not merely to perform tasks for humans, but to enable humans to experience structured, meaningful, and evolving states of being.