Every civilization has come to believe in confessions. That’s why people confess to priests. Fears are confessed to the gods. Ever since psychology began to develop, people have paid money to pour their hearts out to therapists; When the Internet came along, people started confessing to strangers in chat rooms.
The types of listeners have changed. But the desire for recognition has not changed. This would immediately explain why millions of people have confessed their deepest fears and darkest secrets regarding AI.
There is a growing body of research that reveals an explosion in confessions. People share personal information extensively using artificial intelligence. This includes their medical reports, financial concerns, relationship problems, career concerns and much more. Most conversations now center around what AI companies know about us and what they can do with that information. While these are legitimate concerns, they ignore the more important question: Why are we willing to tell an algorithm what we would hesitate to say to another human?
Artificial intelligence like Google?
One explanation comes from Ajay Choudhary, a Padma Bhushan awardee who co-founded HCL and today heads India’s National Quantum Mission. Having witnessed every major technology wave over the past five decades, Chowdhury sees it through an economic lens. He points out that people are treating AI as they once treated Google: another inexpensive digital service that answers questions and solves problems. He says the pattern looks familiar.
For example, he points to Uber. Employees exhausted an entire year’s allocation of AI tokens in just three months. When technology is cheap, people consume it recklessly. They don’t stop to think about the final cost.
But cheap services do not automatically turn into confessions. This becomes clear when talking to Biju Dominic from Fractal Analytics and author of the book “Microstimuli” which studies human behaviour. Dominic points out that people are not open to artificial intelligence because they believe that algorithms are intelligent. It’s because people think they won’t be judged.
Dominic demonstrated this through research his company conducted for a large private sector bank. It operated on the assumption that borrowers who defaulted on loans were avoiding calls because they did not plan to repay. What can be done to get them to change their behavior? When speaking widely with defaulters, Dominic and his team found that most people did not avoid calls because they planned to default. On the contrary, they wanted repayment. But they could not bear the thought of being judged by another human being. They felt they had failed to fulfill their obligations. And every time a call center executive communicates, their sense of shyness increases. When the bank replaced part of the interaction with a non-human interface to remind borrowers to stick to their repayment schedule, collections improved by about 20 percent. The obstacle was not debt. It was a shame.
Amnesty International does not judge
This analogy is used to explain the greatest advantage of artificial intelligence. It’s not intelligence. It is the absence of judgement.
When looked at from this perspective, people over-sharing personal information with AI starts to look out of place. He seems incapable of contempt. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t seem disappointed. It doesn’t make people feel inadequate. And in a world where many conversations carry the risk of judgment, AI offers something very rare: the illusion of a listener who is simply listening.
Dominic says this is ingrained in us and explains why we take our fears to God, our sins to priests, and offload them to therapists. AI, viewed through this lens, does not invent new behavior. It’s an old revival.
Organized religion has always understood this at a very basic level. People reveal their deepest fears if they believe that two conditions are met. First: They will not be tried. The second is that what they say will remain shrouded in ritual and secrecy. Trust was not a byproduct of the institution. It was the establishment.
Now, this begs the question – what happens when we extend the values of this organization to include the frameworks around which AI is built? Unlike a priest or a wizard, a machine belongs to a company. Its rules are not written in scriptures or professional rules, but in terms of service that few of us read and even fewer understand. We act as if the relationship is old. But technology is not like that.
The institutions that taught us how to recognize also spent centuries building the trust that made recognition possible. AI has inherited recognition. She has not yet inherited the institution. We are expanding one of humanity’s oldest instincts into one of its newest inventions. Whether our trust is justified remains an open question. However, one thing is already clear. We are unlikely to stop confessing.
