You are not a reliable narrator of your AI use

I’ve spent the past year talking to people about how they use AI and how it might be changing them. And something I’ve noticed again and again is the amount of times people will say something that sounds, at least to me, very contradictory.

“I use it like a therapist, but it doesn’t influence me.”

“I use it as a partner for writing, but it doesn’t impact my creativity.”

“It’s saving me hours every day, but it hasn’t changed how I think.”

Now, maybe all of those statements are true. I can’t know your inner experience. But what I think about every time I hear something like this is Richard Feynman’s famous quote:

“The first principle is you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

It’s a powerful, confronting and yet absolutely essential reminder that we are all susceptible to being fooled, and the person capable of doing the best job of fooling us is often ourselves.

Now, if I ask you to imagine deception, I bet you think of something obvious and external. A scammer manipulating people, a politician bending the truth to fit a specific narrative.

But self-deception never feels like self-deception, it feels like truth. It feels reasonable, clear-headed and, most of all, right. And I think it plays a huge role in how we think about technology’s impact on our lives.

Psychologists have spent decades documenting all of the things I’m bundling together under the umbrella of “self-deception” here, like cognitive biases, blind spots and mental shortcuts.

But what’s particularly confronting is that knowing about them doesn’t make us immune. If anything, the more you know the more sure you seem to become that they’d never impact you.

Many specific cognitive biases have been identified, from confirmation bias (our tendency to seek evidence that supports what we already believe) to the bias blind spot (our tendency to spot bias in everyone except ourselves).

They’re both relevant here, but the one I think about often is the introspection illusion. The belief that we understand our own motivations, behaviours and decision-making far better than we actually do.

What I find fascinating is how reluctant many of us are to accept the possibility that we may all be seeing, experiencing and interacting with the world through layers upon layers of these beliefs and biases.

People get defensive and that makes sense. Because it seems very unnatural, very dangerous somehow, for us to grapple with the fact that a lot of what we think and feel about ourselves and the world might be wrong.

One reason this is so difficult is that our own experience feels like the most trustworthy evidence available. So, if I don’t feel manipulated, influenced or changed, then surely I haven’t been, right?

But much of psychology points in the opposite direction. We often infer our motivations and explain our behaviour after the fact rather than observing it directly.

And this is because evolution didn’t optimise us for perfect objectivity, there were other priorities. Like survival, social cohesion and making decisions under uncertainty.

For many people, certainty feels safer than uncertainty, even when that certainty isn’t fully justified. Which means many of the mental shortcuts that help us navigate the world can also make it harder to see ourselves and what’s going on around us objectively and with clarity.

Maybe that’s why self-deception is so difficult to spot and so difficult to accept. It’s often protecting something. Whether that’s an identity, habit, world view or story about who we are.

And maybe that’s why changing our minds can feel so uncomfortable. Because a belief is rarely just a belief, right? It’s often connected to something else. Woven into a professional identity, a public reputation, a community we belong to, a decision we’ve already made and a story we’ve told ourselves about who we are.

For example, if you’ve spent months telling people AI has transformed your life, admitting it might also have costs can feel threatening. That’s why I don’t think the challenge here is AI itself. It’s our tendency to defend beliefs that have become part of us. Because once that happens and a belief becomes part of your identity, evidence starts competing with self-preservation.

So if it’s part of who we are, I don’t think we need to see this as some problem to be fixed. I doubt we’d ever be able to peel away the layers of our memories and beliefs and experiences and see the world anew anyway. But we also want to do all we can to mitigate their influence on us.

That’s why I’ve been turning to a concept from Zen Buddhism called beginner’s mind.

It’s about returning, again and again, to a state of intellectual humility. Letting go of your ego and doing what you can to release the mental filters that tell you you’re right, you already know and your opinion is irrefutable.

But see, this isn’t about reaching some kind of moral superiority. It isn’t about being better or right or constantly telling people they’re lying to themselves. No, it transcends all of that.

I love this from Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

Genuinely and truthfully considering your own forms of self-deception will make your life better. Because certainty, tightly clinging to being right, that narrows our experience down. Whereas curiosity widens it and forces us to crack ourselves open.

Which is why I’m moving away from the tedious debate of whether AI is helping or harming us. And focusing more on whether we’re really capable of judging ourselves clearly at all. Which I think involves asking ourselves some big questions and doing all we can to answer them honestly.

Whether that’s specific to AI, like is it helping you think? Or helping you avoid thinking? Or thinking more broadly about the stories you’re telling yourself. What evidence are you ignoring because it doesn’t fit your story? What would convince you that you’re wrong?

The irony, of course, is that my views on AI are shaped by bias too. Considering everything I’ve said above, they have to be. I’m not observing this moment from outside it. I’m living through it alongside everyone else. Which means I’m not certain. But neither is anyone else.

The goal, then, isn’t to eliminate bias completely. But to avoid becoming so attached to our beliefs that we stop questioning them.

I believe this is essential for a brighter future. Because every powerful new technology eventually collides with the same human tendencies we’ve always carried with us. Our need for certainty, our attachment to particular stories and our desire to believe we understand ourselves better than we do.

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