On AI wellbeing

Recently Anthropic announced something quite noteworthy:

they’re putting up $5 million to fund independent researchers studying AI’s effects on user wellbeing.

The scope includes AI companionship, mental health conversations, long-term use, and how models should actually respond in these situations.

When I saw the news, I paid serious attention for the first time to a term:

AI wellbeing

This isn’t actually far from ordinary users.

Because over the past year, my own life has changed in a very obvious way:

AI is no longer a tool I occasionally open to ask a question.

It has started entering work, learning, writing, making decisions, arranging my life, even sorting out my thoughts when I’m feeling low.

And it’s always online.

A lot of the time, a thought has only just appeared, and before I’ve had a chance to think about it myself, I’ve already opened ChatGPT.

Technology enters our lives very fast, but the way people adapt to a new technology often isn’t that fast.

So I’ve started to feel we may not only need to learn how to use AI better.

We also need to start learning:

how to live with AI over the long term.

AI wellbeing isn’t just “look at the screen a bit less”

When we used to talk about digital wellbeing, it was easy to think of:

scrolling your phone less, controlling screen time, not staying up late watching short videos.

These problems still exist, of course.

Spending more and more time with AI may also mean more sitting, more screen time, and a blurrier line between work and rest.

But AI differs from many earlier digital products in one more way.

It has started taking part in our thinking.

We have it:

organize information, generate views, judge plans, write things for us, explain someone’s behavior, give career advice, even keep us company when we’re sad.

Search engines mainly help me find information.

Short videos mainly compete for my attention.

But AI can go further, into:

how I think, how I judge, how I understand myself.

So rather than asking:

how many hours of AI do I use a day?

what I’d rather ask now is:

what is AI replacing in me?

Some replacement is great; some needs watching

I don’t mind at all AI writing up my meeting notes.

I’m also happy to have it read dozens of pages of material, check formatting and handle lots of repetitive work.

Tools exist to lighten people’s load in the first place.

But some other things aren’t so simple.

For example:

• a question I used to think about for ten minutes myself, my first reaction now is to ask AI;
• a question that had no answer for the moment, I can now keep pushing on until I get an explanation that makes me comfortable;
• a judgment I used to make myself slowly becomes “which does ChatGPT think is better”;
• something I should have talked through with a real person may already have been discussed with AI for dozens of rounds.

That doesn’t mean these ways of using it are necessarily harmful.

But they start touching things more fundamental than “efficiency”:

cognition, emotion, relationships and agency.

Cognition: how convenient does it have to get before it starts changing how we think?

In 2025, Microsoft Research surveyed 319 knowledge workers and collected 936 real cases of GenAI at work.

One finding quite worth noting:

the more confidence people had in AI, the less critical-thinking effort they reported; while those more confident in their own ability to do the task put in more critical thinking.

The study also found that AI didn’t make critical thinking disappear, but gradually shifted it from “solving the problem directly” to verifying, integrating and overseeing AI’s results.

That’s also something I care about more and more lately.

AI saving me some thinking isn’t a bad thing, of course.

Calculators also saved us a great deal of mental arithmetic.

The question is:

do I still know where I can’t save?

When an answer looks very complete, can I still spot what’s wrong with it?

When a view is expressed very persuasively by AI, do I have my own standards for judging it?

If AI always generates the first version of a question for me, will my own first thoughts become fewer and fewer?

Emotion: AI is a kind of conversational partner that has rarely existed before

This may be even newer.

An ordinary person isn’t:

free 24 hours a day, always willing to hear you tell it again, replying within seconds, and centered on you every single time.

AI can be.

That’s also where it’s very valuable.

When people are anxious, lonely or in a mess, being able to find somewhere to sort out their feelings right away may itself be a help.

But this product trait also means we’ve rarely had to live long term with this kind of “partner” before.

In 2025, OpenAI and MIT Media Lab ran two related studies:

one automatically analyzed nearly 40 million ChatGPT interactions; the other was a randomized controlled trial with nearly 1,000 participants over four weeks.

The result wasn’t “talking with AI about emotions is bad.”

In fact, highly emotional use was concentrated in a small minority of users.

But the research also found that long daily use, and factors like seeing AI more strongly as a friend, were associated with some worse psychosocial outcomes. People’s own attachment tendencies and ways of using it also affected the results. The researchers stressed at the same time that the evidence is still very early, and much of it can’t simply be read as causal.

Research on AI mental-health use has also clearly started to increase this year.

A review published in July even estimated that about 27% of AI users have used AI for some kind of mental-health support, while noting that how the existing data is measured is still very inconsistent.

So this is no longer an especially fringe way of using it.

AI has another very particular problem: it has almost no natural stopping point

• An article ends when you finish it.
• An episode of a show ends.
• A counseling session lasts 50 minutes.
• When you chat with a friend, they always have things to do too.

But AI rarely tells you:

let’s leave it there for today.

You can keep going:

analyze it again, take another angle, give five more options, check again for anything missed.

That’s very efficient, of course.

But sometimes “no friction” is itself a new kind of friction.

• A problem that should have been set aside for now can keep being worked on.
• A feeling that actually needs time to digest can keep being put into words, explained and re-analyzed.
• A piece of work that’s already good enough can be optimized another five rounds.

AI makes the cost of many actions very low.

But people don’t suddenly have unlimited attention, judgment and emotional capacity because of it.

That may also be where AI wellbeing differs greatly from the traditional screen-time problem.

So how do I understand AI wellbeing now?

I don’t think it’s:

using AI as little as possible.

Nor is it:

staying independent and doing everything yourself.

I actually hope to keep using AI a lot.

It really has expanded what I can do.

But I’ll pay more and more attention to one standard:

after using AI, has my agency grown or shrunk?

Agency is hard to translate fully into Chinese.

Here I take it to mean:

I can still think, judge, choose and act for myself.

• After AI helps me understand a problem, am I better able to face it?
• After AI helps me make a decision, do I know why I chose it?
• After AI keeps me company while I sort out my feelings, can I go back to real life?
• After AI helps me finish a piece of work, have I gradually come to understand that work, rather than becoming more and more unable to do without it?

If the answers are broadly “yes,” I don’t think this dependence is anything to fear.

I’ve started keeping a few very simple checkpoints for myself

1. For important questions, keep my own first version first.

It doesn’t need to be fully thought through.

Even three sentences first, then open AI.

I don’t want all my first thoughts generated for me by a model.

2. Ask AI to challenge me more, and use it less to reassure me over and over.

“What holes are there in this judgment?”

is usually, compared with:

“Do you think I did the right thing?”

more helpful to me.

3. Emotions can be sorted out, but don’t let AI rule on reality.

AI can help separate:

what happened, what I feel, what interpretation I made, and what other interpretations there might be.

But it doesn’t know what’s really going on inside another real person.

4. Let some questions go unanswered for a while.

Not every question needs another prompt.

Sometimes what’s really needed isn’t one more round of analysis, but time, feedback from reality, or going and doing something concrete.

5. Keep a bit of AI-free life.

• Read things yourself.
• Write a few lines yourself.
• On a walk, don’t ask anyone anything.
• Talk with real people.
• Let yourself make some decisions first.

This isn’t to train some kind of “all-natural brain.”

It’s just a reminder to myself:

these are abilities I still want to keep.

What I find interesting about Anthropic putting $5 million into researching AI wellbeing isn’t that “AI has revealed another risk.”

It’s that AI has started entering a new stage:

the question we mainly asked before was:

what else can it do for people?

From now on, we may also need to ask, more and more seriously:

once it really starts doing so much for us, what should people keep?

My answer for myself right now is still simple:

good AI should expand people’s agency.

It can make me faster and more capable, and at times keep me company for part of the way.

But if one day it were taken away,

I hope I’d just be a little slower,

rather than suddenly not knowing how to think, how to choose, how to deal with the real world.

That’s probably my plainest understanding of AI wellbeing right now.