AI Is Already Changing Your Consciousness

A man discovered his girlfriend had been feeding their arguments into ChatGPT—using it to craft better comebacks. He felt betrayed. Not because she'd cheated, but because he wanted to fight with her, not some AI ghostwriter.

This small domestic scene points to something much larger. In our latest essay, we argue that AI is already changing human consciousness—not because ChatGPT is sentient, but because AI changes what you can know, which changes what feels meaningful to you.

If consciousness is the subjective experience of meaning-making in action, then AI absolutely changes consciousness.

Drawing on our research with over a thousand people, we explore what happens when meaning is no longer made only between humans, but in collaboration with machines. We introduce symbolic plasticity—a kind of cognitive flexibility that governs how people revise their fundamental frameworks when AI challenges what they thought they knew. And we propose neosemantic design: building AI interactions that create space for meaning to form, rather than rushing to fill it.

Current AI design treats consciousness as inefficiency to bypass. We think that's exactly wrong. The people who thrive with AI are those who stay aware—who notice how the interaction is changing them, in real time.

We're building the symbolic environments where consciousness unfolds. We can design for reflection, pause, and productive friction—or for seamlessness that quietly moves meaning-making outside of awareness.

Read the full essay here.