Our relationships with AI

'𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗜 — 𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝗳𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝘁' Living and Learning with AI Inquiry

This inquiry was triggered after watching two video's back to back by tech podcaster Anika Rani. The first video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvd4-ZHSKkE&t=147s provided an enthusiastic account of the value of ChatGPT, the second reported a more considered and cautious use of AI www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9XxbE_952w What was said made me think that we are all on a journey through which we build our relationships with AI and with something as complex, emergent and fast changing as AI, its a never ending story - at least with the current generation of AI! My story of human-AI relationships emerged from a collaborative inquiry with Claude and ChatGPT, is shared below.

How Are You Living with AI?

She started as an evangelical advocate for ChatGPT. Six months later, she was talking about reclaiming important parts of herself that she had quietly handed over to it. Her honesty was striking — because most of us never notice the handover happening at all.

— The observation that started this inquiry

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

We don't have a single relationship with AI. We have many — sometimes within a single day. We may be thoughtfully in control in one part of our lives while quietly drifting in another. The same person who carefully governs their AI use at work may be surrendering their evenings to algorithmic recommendation without a second thought.

This framework offers a map of those different relationships — not to judge them, but to make them visible. Because the first step toward living well with AI is simply knowing what kind of relationship you are actually in.

When you reach for your phone in the morning — who decided what you see first?

When you ask AI to draft something — who decides what it means?

When a streaming service suggests what to watch tonight — how often do you override it?

These are not trick questions. They are invitations to notice something easy to miss: that AI is already shaping your attention, your information, your choices — and the degree to which you are shaping that relationship varies enormously across different parts of your life.

Three kinds of relationship

Conscious & Reflective

You are deliberately governing your relationship with AI. You know what you are doing and why.

Using AI as a genuine thinking partner
Scaffolding learning, then stepping back
Choosing, on principle, not to use it
Moving through immersion and doubt toward earned selectivity

Transitional

Some awareness is present, but it is partial, reactive, or driven by what others expect rather than your own reflection.

Using AI to appear current or competent
Picking it up for specific tasks without reflecting on the broader pattern

Unreflective

AI is shaping your habits and judgements — but not through your conscious choice.

Cycling between use and avoidance without resolution
AI woven invisibly into daily routines
Gradually delegating decisions to algorithms
Not yet in any considered relationship with AI at all

"The question is not whether AI is good or bad. It is whether you are awake to what is happening in your relationship with it."

↗

These positions are not fixed

People move between them — sometimes quickly. Many begin with occasional, task-based use and develop, through curiosity and deliberate reflection, into something far more conscious and generative. That journey is available to anyone willing to notice where they are starting from.

Going deeper: what your relationship actually looks like

Page 2 of 2

Within any relationship — four modes

Even within a conscious, reflective relationship with AI, you move between different ways of engaging. Recognising which mode you are in — and whether it is the right one for what you are trying to do — is itself part of what it means to relate to AI well.

How visible is the AI in your life?

Not all AI announces itself. Some is explicit and chosen. Some shapes what you see through familiar platforms without drawing attention. Some is so embedded in background infrastructure it never registers at all.

Instrumental

Using AI for task completion — drafting, searching, summarising. You assess and judge the outputs.

Risk: sliding into over-dependence as judgement gradually slips

Dialogic

AI as thinking partner — sense-making through sustained exchange. You set the direction and own the inquiry.

Risk: projecting genuine understanding onto a system that does not have it

Evaluative

Using AI to challenge and stress-test your ideas. You retain interpretive authority over what the critique reveals.

Risk: delegating judgement to the very system being evaluated

Integrative

AI woven across multiple domains of life and work simultaneously. You maintain oversight of the whole.

Risk: producing faster than you can genuinely own what has been produced

How visible is AI in your everyday life?

High visibility

You know you are working with AI, chose to do so, and can reflect on what that means. Conscious agency is easier to sustain here.

Partial visibility

AI shapes what you encounter through recommendation engines and personalised feeds. Agency may erode quietly without your noticing.

Low visibility

AI embedded in background infrastructure — security, prediction, ambient voice. There is nothing obvious to notice or question.

Making the invisible visible — becoming aware of low-visibility AI in your life — is often the most important first move toward conscious governance.

Questions worth sitting with

In which parts of my life am I most deliberate about AI — and where am I drifting without noticing?

When I use AI, which mode am I in — and is that the right mode for what I am trying to achieve?

What am I gaining from my AI relationships — and what might I be quietly relinquishing?

How much of my information environment — what I read, watch, hear — have I actually chosen?

What would I want my relationship with AI to look like in a year — and what would it take to get there?

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

An invitation to inquire

This framework is not a checklist or a diagnosis. It is a heuristic — a thinking tool designed to help you notice things you might otherwise miss and ask questions you might not otherwise think to ask.

It was developed through a process that is itself an example of what it describes: a sustained, reflective collaboration between a human author and two AI agents — Claude and ChatGPT — in which the human remained the conscious custodian of the inquiry throughout, directing, questioning, improving, and owning every significant judgement.

The Living and Learning with AI Inquiry invites you to examine your own relationship with AI — not as an academic exercise, but as an act of responsible self-governance. The relationships we build 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 are you reallyliving with AI?