My (complicated) relationship with AI: often seductive, occasionally frustrating and always demanding vigilance

‘AI and its agents are not disappearing, and there is no returning to the world before them. Our relationship with AI only deepens from here,’ writes Dr Setareh Seyedghorban. Photograph: d3sign/Getty Images

I am walking between carriages in search of a cup of tea on a train travelling over 100 miles an hour from Liverpool to London when I see half the people in my carriage in deep conversations with a machine: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to name a few. I am meant to be on sabbatical, the rare stretch of academic life reserved for slow thinking. Around me, almost nobody is thinking slowly.

This is not limited to a train carriage. Half of the adults surveyed in one US study reported using an AI chatbot, one example of how fast people are entering a relationship with their AI tools, which now receive more of our questions, problems and drafts than our friends and colleagues do.