The People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI

This story is part of a series marking ChatGPT’s third anniversary. Read Charlie Warzel on the precarity that ChatGPT introduced to the world, Ian Bogost on how ChatGPT broke reality, or browse more AI coverage from The Atlantic.

Tim Metz is worried about the “Google Maps–ification” of his mind. Just as many people have come to rely on GPS apps to get around, the 44-year-old content marketer fears that he is becoming dependent on AI. He told me that he uses AI for up to eight hours each day, and he’s become particularly fond of Anthropic’s Claude. Sometimes, he has as many as six sessions running simultaneously. He consults AI for marriage and parenting advice, and when he goes grocery shopping, he takes photos of the fruits to ask if they are ripe. Recently, he was worried that a large tree near his house might come down, so he uploaded photographs of it and asked the bot for advice. Claude suggested that Metz sleep elsewhere in case the tree fell, so he and his family spent that night at a friend’s. Without Claude’s input, he said, “I would have never left the house.” (The tree never came down, though some branches did.)

I witnessed Metz’s compulsive AI use firsthand: Before I interviewed him for this article, he instructed Claude to reverse engineer the questions I might ask by using web-search tools and, if it wanted, a team of AI agents. Claude spent a few minutes searching for information on me before compiling its research into a one-pager. A section offered a mini biography on me; another detailed potential responses to questions I was likely to ask.