The Illusion of Choice

Dec 27

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was named the Word of The Year by several dictionaries and language organisations (like Collins Dictionary) in 2023, noting how it “has accelerated at a dizzying pace” and “transformed the way we work, learn, and communicate.” Yet, most of us don’t know how far AI has seeped into every crack and crevice of our daily lives. In the thrill of hyper-personalised AI content, we have slowly begun chipping away at our individuality. AI has blurred the lines between whether we control technology, or technology quietly controls us. From advanced virtual assistants to finely tuned recommendation systems and smartphone features we barely notice, let’s explore how these everyday tools shape our choices—and how, in the process, we risk surrendering parts of ourselves.

Virtual Assistants

Believe it or not, the first virtual assistant appeared in 1966. It was called ELIZA, and although it wasn’t actually “smart,” people still felt like it understood them. Decades later came Microsoft’s Clippy — the cute paperclip that popped up with tips. It may have annoyed people, but it showed that computers could try to help us. Things changed completely once Siri arrived in 2011. Suddenly, you could ask your phone questions the same way you’d ask a friend. After that came Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana, and talking to technology started to feel normal. In 2022, ChatGPT made an even bigger jump by holding long, meaningful conversations that felt more natural than anything before. Since then, virtual assistants have only become smarter — they can understand text, voice, and even images. Now, almost 500-600 million people use AI-powered virtual assistants daily to fuel their study routine, learning or work. So the question arises, at which point does AI do the work, and not us? People are becoming dependent on AI for basic tasks, losing their own skills in the process, a concept termed as “skill decay”. As chatbots like ChatGPT can mimic cognitive skills to complete a vast range of tasks, disuse of these skills by humans induces accelerated skill decay. The concept is not at all new to us. For example, in the years 2008-2010, revolutionary Global Positioning System (GPS) technology became easily accessible to the entire world due to the boom of smartphones, rapid 3G internet speeds and development of Google Maps. People were afraid that they would lose sense of routes and common paths by becoming over-reliant on these apps to navigate roads. However, the case with advanced Virtual Assistants is different. Chatbots are multi-specialised, and are trained on the entire wealth of knowledge of the internet. You can guarantee that a Chatbot can complete a task faster, and more accurately than a regular person ever can. So, it’s too tempting to resist using this superpower at our fingertips to excel at any task. The temptation to rely on them is enormous—and with it comes the risk of devaluing our own creativity. We now live in a world where producing work that resembles something generated by a machine is no longer an insult, but a compliment.

Recommendation Algorithms

Whenever you open YouTube or Netflix and instantly find something you love, that’s AI at work. Early recommendation systems were very simple, but today’s versions learn from how we watch — what we click on, how long we stay, when we pause, what we skip. Over time, they get better at understanding our tastes, sometimes even before we understand them ourselves. In the past, watching videos or movies began with a delightful exploration of personal interest, continuing to a relaxing respite from the exhausting monotonous routine of the day. Now, we are forcefully overwhelmed with endless targeted content, not based on individual thought or emotion, but from large collected data over a long period of time. What we watch, hear and see online is no longer a choice we make, but a choice made for us, shaped quietly and constantly by algorithms trained to capture our attention. The content we watch feeds into the algorithm, training it to recommend more captivating videos or movies, hooking innocent viewers into a loop that is difficult to escape. Without our knowledge, our individuality is diluted as millions of users are all guided towards the same formats, same trends and same repeated ideas. The question that follows is unsettling — are we choosing our entertainment, or is our entertainment choosing us?

Smartphone Features

AI also powers many tiny moments in our day. When your phone brightens a dark photo, blurs the background, or groups pictures by people — that’s AI. It learns which apps you open most, suggests them before you even think of it, and adjusts your brightness automatically. It even protects you by recognising your face, filtering spam, and warning you about scam calls.
But all these small conveniences come with a quiet trade-off. Your phone has to watch you closely to “help” you. It studies your habits, your routines, even your expressions, turning your everyday actions into data. What starts as simple suggestions slowly becomes gentle steering — your device nudging you toward certain apps, certain choices, certain behaviours.
The more AI steps in, the less we notice how much control we’re handing over. Each helpful moment takes a tiny piece of our independence, until one day we realise our phones aren’t just assisting us — they’re guiding us.

Artificial Intelligence is becoming deeply integrated into our daily lives, supporting how we write, learn, communicate, and make decisions. These systems genuinely enhance our abilities — helping us work more efficiently, stay organised, and access information that would otherwise take hours to find. However, as AI becomes increasingly embedded in our routines, it is important to ensure that we do not unintentionally weaken the very skills that make us human. Maintaining a sense of individuality requires conscious effort: choosing when to rely on AI and when to think independently, questioning how our data is collected and used, and staying aware of the subtle ways algorithms can shape our preferences. AI can elevate our potential, but only when used with intention. A balanced approach — where we embrace AI’s strengths while preserving our own judgement, creativity, and autonomy — allows both humans and machines to work together without diminishing what makes us unique.