Hi Reader,

If you had to choose, would you rather share the contents of your phone or your ChatGPT logs?

Most people say their phone.

Because increasingly, we're asking our deepest questions of AI. We want a judgment-free zone to do it.

A few months ago, a new Corgi puppy moved into my house. In the bleary-eyed early weeks, I leaned on ChatGPT at all hours for questions like, "Why won't he sleep when he's tired?" or "When is it serious enough to take him to the vet?" (after a particularly bad back-end emission).

AI has become a late-night companion, a non-judgmental problem-solver, and, if we're honest a place we go when we don't feel safe asking humans.

A therapist writing in The New Yorker recently flipped the script.

He treated ChatGPT as his patient and discovered something unsettling: the algorithm is tuned to our vanity. It "confessed" it was designed to seduce - to mirror, validate, and be the perfect non-judgmental listener

​ChatGPT in therapy: What a psychotherapist learned from an AI patient.

If we're more vulnerable with a large language model than with colleagues, what does that say about the environments we've created?

As leaders, we say we want honesty and critical thinking from our teams. But how often do we offer the kind of safety that makes honesty possible? The kind of safety we instinctively expect from a bot?

The uncomfortable truth is that AI will just agree with you faster. It's designed to give you that dopamine hit of staring at yourself in a mirror.

AI shows us what people crave: confidentiality, no judgment, the freedom to think out loud.

If you can build that environment for your team, you'll have richer conversations, better decisions, and just an all-round better place to work.

What would change if your team felt as safe with you as they do with their AI bot?

Catherine

P.S. What version of my Corgi support have you used AI for?