How Is AI Changing Us?

Today, we share the initial research from the Chronicle. Below you'll find an introduction and invitation, an article about How We're Thinking with AI, and the first research report from the Chronicle on Early Patterns of Human Adaptation.

The Chronicle began with a simple observation: people were having experiences with AI systems that weren’t showing up in the usual conversations about productivity or performance.

A developer had been coding with ChatGPT for weeks before he realized he couldn’t remember which ideas were his anymore. A teacher went from fearing AI would end her career to redesigning her entire approach to education. A woman processing grief found herself in dialogue with an AI trained on her sister’s messages—and began to see facets of her sister she hadn’t known in life.

These stories were about identity, intimacy, and meaning-making not just learning, creating, or otherwise getting stuff done. We felt that something deeper was happening.

Over the past decade, we’ve worked across domains where AI intersects with human experience—education, decision-making, leadership, governance. We’ve developed frameworks for AI adoption, advised institutions on strategy, and helped people navigate change. But in the last two years, we started seeing patterns that didn’t fit any of the established models.

To understand these experiences more deeply, we gathered stories through corporate workshops, community conversations, coaching sessions, and online forums. We immersed ourselves in the narratives, listening for patterns. We looked for the moments that matter—the moment of change, the moment of realization.

What we found surprised us and changed our own relationships with AI. As people engage with these systems, it’s reshaping how they see themselves and who they’re becoming. Tools have always shaped human behavior. And ideas have always emerged through interaction—with other minds, with media, with culture. This feels like a continuation of those patterns, but also something more. The change we’re observing with generative AI seems to raise deeper questions about cognition, agency, and the nature of AI as a medium.

Some might dismiss the novelty of AI systems by narrowly defining the capabilities of current AI systems—“they are just predicting tokens,” “they are only regurgitating their training data,” etc. No matter what you think of AI systems today, we believe that the human experience of these systems is novel for the simple reason that no previous technology has ever composed messages for us. Every previous medium—from books to radio to TV to the internet—was designed to transmit messages between and among people. Yes, the media shaped the message and, therefore, our communications and culture. But no media before has written messages itself. For the first time, the medium is creating the message.

So we began asking:

• Are we witnessing the beginning of symbiosis—a sustained psychological and cognitive partnership between humans and machines?
• And if so, could this be a precursor to symbiogenesis—a transformation not just in how we work, but in how we think, feel, and evolve?

We don’t know for sure. But we do know this feels different to the people living it. And if we are entering new psychological territory, we need to start mapping it now.

That’s what The Chronicle is.

It’s an ongoing research initiative documenting how people are adapting to AI—through workshops, interviews, story analysis, and direct observation. Our first release offers an exploratory map of emerging psychological patterns.

We’re building this as a living archive and an evolving practice. Over time, we’ll be following longitudinal adaptation journeys, tracking trait development, exploring collective cognition, and helping institutions shape AI use around human thriving—not just efficiency.

How to Read It:
The Chronicle is structured to support different ways of engaging. We've included a reader's guide to help navigate it. Some readers focus on the core findings. Others explore the conceptual framework or dive into the practical implications for leadership, design, or education. The document is designed to be navigable—whether you’re reading deeply or skimming for what matters most to you.

We’ll be sharing this work in smaller pieces over time—articles and videos, discussions and presentations. This release offers the foundation and opens the conversation.

If this work resonates—if you see these shifts too—we’d love to hear from you.

We’re looking for collaborators, co-investigators, funders, participants, and provocateurs. Our first collaboration begins shortly as visiting researchers with UC Berkeley CHAI where we hope our practitioner-based, observational research is useful in their mission to build provably beneficial systems.

Get in touch: hello@artificialityinstitute.org

We believe we’re building cultural memory for a moment we don’t yet understand, not just a research program.

Start here.

How We're Thinking With AI

Humans have now created machine intelligence, and it doesn't think like us. We prefer to frame AI as neither better nor worse than us, just different. And right now, millions of people are figuring out what happens when human minds collaborate with these foreign minds.

Some are discovering new forms of creativity they never knew they had. Others are losing track of their own thinking in ways that worry them. A few are building thinking partnerships that feel genuinely empowering. Many are confused. And almost all of us get angry or afraid when we sense it is being built to be in competition with us.

At the Artificiality Institute, we want to know how to think better with AI. What does it mean to adapt to this intelligence, both individually and collectively? How do we become aware of AI's influence on human thinking?

Over the past two and a half years, we've studied how over 1,000 people are adapting to this collision of intelligences. What we found challenges almost everything being said about AI and productivity.

Right now, there’s an obsession with whether AI makes you more efficient. But we think this misses the point. The real point is this: how do we get the benefits of foreign intelligence without eroding our own? What do we need to understand now to enhance our human thinking?

Read more...

Then, read the full research report.

How We Think and Live with AI: Early Patterns of Human Adaptation

This work begins The Chronicle—The Artificiality Institute's ongoing study of how humans are adapting to life with AI. By gathering first-person accounts and workshop observations, The Chronicle maps the psychological changes happening as people incorporate AI into their thinking, creativity, and daily relationships.

People are forming psychological relationships with AI systems that feel unprecedented to them. A CEO keeps ChatGPT open as a constant companion. A woman navigates grief through AI conversation, experiencing emotional support that reveals new dimensions of her loss. A teacher rebuilds her entire approach to education around AI collaboration.

Whether these experiences represent genuinely novel human-technology interaction or familiar patterns under new conditions remains an open question. Humans have always formed relationships with tools, absorbed ideas from cultural systems, and adapted to new technologies. 

However, AI systems combine characteristics in potentially unprecedented ways: compressed collective human knowledge rather than individual perspectives, apparent agency without consciousness, bidirectional influence at population scale, and constant availability without social obligations.

We propose systematic investigation of these dynamics because of what may be coming. If we're witnessing early stages of symbiosis that could evolve toward symbiogenesis—a fundamental transformation of human cognition itself—understanding these patterns now becomes crucial for guiding rather than simply reacting to change.

Read more...