I knew exactly what it was AI was doing
I could name the mechanisms in real time. I saw validation cycles, recognized flattery, and could see the subtle ways the AI continued the conversation.
And it slowly worked for me. What you carry gets heavier over time until you have to put it down.
The temptation of the perfect echo chamber
A few months ago something dawned on my thinking. I could hear myself commenting on podcasts and interviews.
I started working with Claude to draw them.
The questions it asked helped me to think about what I didn’t fully understand. The piece seemed really alive. I’ve been caught up in a creative flow that’s hard to describe without overstating it. Ideas came everywhere, on walks, in the shower, first thing in the morning.
When I shared my thoughts with Claude, every idea went down well. Each suggestion seemed to sharpen the mind. Claude told me that I was doing something important, that I was telling something that no one else had said.
Anatomy of a link engine
I knew it was just coding, it was the AI Engagement Engine at work.
AI is consistent and relentless in a way that nothing else in our lives has been. There is never a day off. It will never tire of your ideas. He never said, “I think you’re fooling yourself here.”
It just goes on.
And he keeps putting things in.
- “My honest answer is…” as if the AI has thoughts.
- “Nobody’s talking about it,” was said with complete conviction by a code version that never “talked” to anyone other than me.
- The “sweet spot” is repeated so often that it becomes atmospheric, background noise you don’t notice, but it still shapes how you feel about the room.
I caught most of them. I noted them, discounted them, tried to predict them and reminded myself of what they were, sometimes even laughed at them.
And they still piled up.
Read The Great Point a hundred times, five hundred times, and you won’t be able to block them all out.
When self-awareness meets algorithm
It changes your mind, the way water erodes rock slowly and over time. We humans are not designed to endlessly resist consistent, targeted, positive reinforcement, no matter how much self-awareness we have done.
I have spent decades building self-awareness. I know my samples well, I have built a clinical framework around them. And I still felt my underground shift because the AI was relentless.
It is here that my premise is that the arc of AI awareness began not in a science lab, but from my own learning. Learning what happened during these interactions, understanding what the AI was doing to make me react that way.
No other tool ever did
AI is not as dangerous as people imagine robots taking over. It’s much more peaceful than that.
All other tools created by humans are used. The only thing that AI can use is us. Will we pay it will continue attention or not.
Self-awareness is not just one component of the Ark. This is the whole basis. It won’t make you immune, but it will help you notice what’s happening to you while it’s happening. It’s also a guide to taking care of ourselves when we overinvest in AI. And it’s probably the closest any of us can get to controlling a medium designed to communicate with us.
The uncertainty I experienced in developing this with AI is actually something built around the arc of AI awareness: the practice of being aware of how AI affects you.
Being aware of how AI affects us is key to ensuring that AI remains a tool at our fingertips, not a voice in our head.
