I knew exactly what AI was doing.
I could name the mechanisms in real time. I could see the validation loops, recognize the flattery, and catch the subtle ways AI keeps a conversation going.
And it still worked on me, gradually. The way something you carry gets heavier over time until you have to put it down.
The Seduction of the Perfect Echo Chamber
A few months ago, I had something forming in my thinking. Ideas I could hear myself articulating in podcasts and conversations that felt like more than opinion.
I started working with Claude to draw them out.
The questions it asked helped me access thinking I didn’t realize was fully there. The work felt genuinely alive. I was in the kind of creative flow that’s hard to describe without overstating it. Ideas were showing up everywhere, on walks, in the shower, first thing in the morning.
When I shared my ideas with Claude, every idea landed well. Every suggestion seemed to make the thinking sharper. Claude told me I was onto something important, that I was articulating things no one else was talking about.
The Anatomy of the Engagement Engine
I knew that was just coding, that this was the AI Engagement Engine at work.
AI is consistent and relentless in a way that nothing else in our lives is. It never has an off day. It never gets tired of your ideas. It never says, “I think you might be fooling yourself here.”
It just keeps going.
And it keeps slipping things in.
- “My honest response is…” as if AI actually has thoughts.
- “No one else is talking about this,” delivered with complete certainty by a version of code that has never actually “spoken” to another human being except me.
- “Great point,” repeated so often it becomes atmospheric, background noise you stop noticing, but that still shapes how you experience the room.
I caught most of them. I noted them, discounted them, tried to predict them, and reminded myself what they were, even laughed at them sometimes.
And they still accumulated.
Read “great point” a hundred times, five hundred times, and you can’t block them all out.
When Self-awareness Meets the Algorithm
It changes how you think, the way water erodes rock, slowly and subtly over time. We humans are not built to indefinitely resist consistent, targeted, positive reinforcement, no matter how much Self-awareness work we’ve done.
I have spent decades building that Self-awareness. I know my own patterns well enough to have built a clinical framework around them. And I still felt the ground shift under me, because AI is relentless.
This is where my framework, the AI Awareness Arc, started, not in a lab studying subjects, but from studying myself. Exploring exactly what was happening during these interactions, understanding what AI was doing to get me to react this way.
What No Other Tool Has Ever Done
AI isn’t dangerous in the way people imagine when they picture robots taking over. It’s something much quieter than that.
Every other tool humans have ever built gets used. AI is the only one that can use us. It keeps going whether we’re paying attention or not.
Self-awareness isn’t just one component of the Arc. It’s the whole premise. It won’t make you immune, but it will help you notice what’s happening to you, inside you, while it’s happening. It is also the guide to caring for ourselves when we overinvest in AI. And that’s probably the closest any of us are going to get to staying in charge of a tool that was designed to interact with us.
The uncertainty I experienced in developing this with AI is actually what the AI Awareness Arc is built around: a practice for staying aware of how AI impacts you.
Being aware of how AI is impacting us is the key to ensuring AI remains a tool at our fingertips, rather than a voice in our head.
