Living with AI

'𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗜 — 𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝗳𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝘁' Living & Learning with AI Inquiry
I only had the vaguest idea of how I was using and interacting with AI across my life until I decided to undertake a review, with the help of AI as a cognitive companion. I am sharing my approach in case it is of interest and value to others.

Do You Know How AI Is Shaping Your Life? — Norman Jackson

Most of us have a vague sense that AI is in our lives. But when I actually looked — device by device, app by app — what I found surprised me. Not because there was so much. Because I had never noticed it.

— Norman Jackson, researcher and author of this inquiry

Most conversations about AI ask whether you use it. This one asks something more interesting: how you use it — and what that relationship is doing to you.

You probably already have dozens of AI-powered apps across your devices. Some you chose deliberately. Others arrived quietly and stayed. A few are shaping your attention, your tastes, and your choices in ways you’ve never stopped to examine.

This inquiry invites you to look. It takes a few hours, needs no special tools, and produces a picture of your own AI ecology that is genuinely worth having.

Which AI are you actually using — and how often?

Which is quietly shaping what you see, hear, and choose?

Which have you consciously chosen — and which have you simply accumulated?

“I began with only a vague idea about how much AI I was using. What I found was a layered ecology I had quietly assembled without ever consciously designing it.”

What you will discover

Your ‘family of AI agents’

Across your phone, laptop, TV and home devices you have assembled a personal collection of AI tools — many more than you might expect. Some are doing valuable work for you. Others are simply there.

The AI you never notice

Security systems, predictive features, spam filters, background algorithms — this ‘invisible infrastructure’ is often the most pervasive layer of AI in a person’s digital life. It rarely gets examined.

Where AI has the most influence

It isn’t always where you think. The strongest shaping force in many people’s lives isn’t ChatGPT — it’s the recommendation engine on their TV or phone that decides what they watch and read each evening.

Whether your use is deliberate or drifting

There’s a meaningful difference between using AI intentionally — as a thinking partner, a creative tool, a navigator — and simply accumulating it. This review helps you see which is which.

Five steps — an afternoon’s work

Norman Jackson developed this approach while reviewing his own AI use. It is designed to be straightforward enough for anyone to replicate. You don’t need technical expertise — just curiosity and a few hours.

Take stock of your apps. Choose your two most-used devices — usually phone and laptop. Take screenshots of all the apps installed. Upload them to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to list the AI-enabled ones.

Rate how intensively you use each one. For each AI-enabled app, note whether you use it daily, occasionally, or rarely. This immediately separates the AI that is genuinely woven into your life from what is merely installed.

Ask an AI to categorise them. Upload your list to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to sort your apps by function — communication, productivity, entertainment, invisible infrastructure, creative tools, generative AI. This surfaces things that unaided reflection misses.

Extend to other devices and services. Consider your TV, smart speaker, tablet. Then think about the everyday services you use — banking, shopping, healthcare apps, parking — where AI is operating on your behalf without you directing it.

Step back and look at the whole picture. Ask an AI to help you write up what you’ve found — identifying patterns, mapping where AI is dense and where it’s thin, and reflecting on what it means for how you live.

What one person found

Norman Jackson applied this method to his own life and found five distinct zones of AI presence across five devices:

📱

Smartphone

AI spread thinly across all of daily life — navigation, health, communication, news

💻

Laptop

AI concentrated around thinking, writing, production — the cognitive engine

📺

Smart TV

The strongest curator in the home — quietly shaping what you watch and when

🔊

Alexa / Smart Speaker

Ambient voice-mediated AI woven into the background of domestic life

📝

iPad

Portable companion — flexible, episodic, shifting between leisure, creativity and learning

His conclusion

“What this ecology does not reveal is heavy dependence on attention-driven social platforms. The configuration is relatively intentional and purpose-oriented — AI serving thinking, making, and connecting rather than passive consumption. But the most significant question it raised was whether, as ambient AI expands, that deliberate character would be maintained — or quietly erode.”

Why bother?

AI is not a thing you decide to use or not use. It is already everywhere — in the apps you open every morning, in the services that manage your money and health, in the platforms deciding what news and culture reaches you.

Most people’s relationship with AI is unexamined. Not because they don’t care — but because nobody has ever invited them to look. This inquiry offers that invitation.

Three things this review gives you

Visibility over an AI ecology you already inhabit
A basis for conscious, deliberate choice
A contribution to collective understanding of how ordinary people are living with AI

Questions the review tends to raise

Which AI am I actively choosing — and which have I simply accumulated?

Is my engagement with AI deliberate and reflective — or drifting toward the passive and habitual?

What am I gaining from these relationships — and what might I be quietly giving up?

How much of what I read, watch, and encounter have I actually chosen?

Where is AI shaping my habits and tastes without my full awareness?

Are there parts of my thinking I want to keep genuinely, irreducibly my own?

Join the inquiry

The Living and Learning with AI Inquiry invites ordinary people — not researchers, not technologists — to undertake their own review and share what they find.

Your account of your own AI ecology — however partial, however provisional — is a contribution to collective understanding. It helps build a picture of how real people are living with AI: not in the abstract, but in kitchens and commutes and late evenings, across the small habits and large decisions that make up a life.

The relationships we are building with AI now are shaping the habits of mind and patterns of practice through which our future selves will be formed.

That seems worth paying attention to.

How to start

Pick up your phone or laptop. Open the apps screen.

Take a screenshot. Upload it to ChatGPT or Claude.

Ask: “Which of these apps use AI?” Then follow the five steps on page 2.

Share what you find with the inquiry.

Do you know how AI isshaping your life?