Half of Us Now Confide in Machines, Not People

A writer on a train from Liverpool to London looks up and sees half the carriage deep in conversation with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. She is supposed to be on sabbatical — a rare period in academic life meant for slow thinking. Almost nobody around her is thinking slowly. This is not just one train. In one US study, half of the adults surveyed said they had used an AI chatbot. These tools now receive more of our questions, problems and drafts than our friends and colleagues do. For a multilingual academic, AI has levelled the playing field. But she says she will keep thinking, judging and developing ideas that are stubbornly her own. Her relationship with AI, she writes, is often seductive, sometimes frustrating — and always demands vigilance.