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Author: Jill Maschio, Ph.D.
October 2025
Artificial Intelligence keeps progressing. There is talk about the effects on society if and when AI becomes superintelligent. Society does not yet have an answer, so I feel it is essential to have these kinds of discussions. As of today, the field of psychology is not keeping pace with being proactive, and yet, the elephant in the room is how AI will alter the human mind. How significant will the effect be? How can I prevent the changes in my mind? Let’s consider conditioned behavior. Conditioned behavior is a theory and idea that humans are “conditionable”. I think that’s what Yuval Noah Harari refers to when he says that humans are hackable animals. Humans are easily conditioned to things, objects, and stimuli in their environment. We are conditioned to hundreds of things. Our brains are hardwired to learn, and this starts as early as infancy.
Behaviorists, such as B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) and Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), have known that humans are conditioned. According to Pavlov’s work, conditioning occurs through association. The brain learns to associate things together after pairing them and forming a new meaning of how the objects are associated. In a psychology course I teach, students watch the movie Khumba directed by Anthony Silverston. Khumba, a zebra, is conditioned. Students analyze his conditioned behavior and the decisions he makes from it. Khumba was born without all of his stripes. At the same time, there has been no rain, and the herd’s water hole is drying up. The herd determines that Khumba’s lack of stripes is the cause of the drought. A praying mantis draws Khumba a map of a magic water hole, so Khumba believes that if he finds the magic water hole, he can swim in it, and he’ll get all of his stripes. So, Khumba sets out on a long journey to find the magic water hole. In real life, one conditioned behavior has the potential to direct our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors more than we realize. They can become our desires. Khumba’s desire was to get more stripes so he could be accepted and not blamed for the drought.
The work of B.F. Skinner shows that learning can occur through the consequences of actions. If we are rewarded for doing something, we will want that same reward in the future. Humans can also learn to avoid negative consequences. Either way, whether seeking a repeat reward or avoiding a behavior, humans are creators of habits.
Humans are creators of habit through conditioned behavior. Humans can be conditioned to a variety of things. Humans are shaped, molded, and transformed by the society in which they live. This conditioning, at the neural level, constitutes learning. At the neural level, neurologist David Glanzmann has shown that learning is the process by which new neurons begin to fire together, and through repetition, the neurons become stronger, resulting in learned and automatic behaviors. Every time Khumba ruminated, or something triggered him to think of how he was less than a zebra, it strengthened his memory at the neural level. Over time, and through repetition, conditioned behaviors become very strong motivators. Every time a trigger arises, it reinforces the thought and behavioral response. At the neural level, neurochemicals also play a role. Dopamine, for example, is a “feel-good” neurochemical. Our experiences produce it and “spikes” of it in the dopamine pathways in the brain. If you like to eat cookies, you may notice how doing so gives you a moment of satisfaction, and then the moment is gone. That’s the result of dopamine in the brain spiking from receiving a reward in the form of a cookie. When thinking of something negative, the brain’s dopamine levels decrease, and we then experience internal conflict because the brain wants to rebalance the dopamine.
Our society can also condition behaviors. Many people are conditioned to their cell phones. When a notification sounds, people respond by looking at their phone. That is a conditioned behavior. In need of information, many people turn to a search engine to find it or an answer to something, and do so automatically. That is conditioned behavior.
Many people are already conditioned to technology, and it has slowly altered the human brain. Think of it this way: every time the brain modifies itself to learn something new, it is evolving. The person is transformed with every learning incident. That is how we grow, adapt to our environment, and learn to function in the world and our daily lives. The adapting brain is what helps us to survive.
Technology is another factor in our lives that has transformed the human mind. Increasingly, people are incorporating AI into their daily lives. Here’s a summary of how people are using AI and how many people in the U.S. are using it (or exposed to it), based on recent surveys and research:
How people are using AI
People use AI in a variety of domains, including:
Work / productivity:
AI tools are increasingly used for tasks like drafting emails, summarizing documents, writing code, data analysis, brainstorming, and automating routine parts of workflows. (Pew Research Center)
Learning / research / education:
- Users employ AI for studying, getting explanations, homework help, and exploring new topics. (Pew Research Center)
Entertainment / creative tasks:
- Some people use AI chatbots for conversation, storytelling, generating images, or other creative outputs. (Pew Research Center)
Everyday services / background uses:
- Many AI applications operate behind the scenes in products people use (e.g. recommendation engines, virtual assistants, image recognition). (Gallup.com)
Augmentation vs automation:
- In an analysis of usage of Claude.ai, about 57 % of AI use was “augmentation” (helping humans improve or refine outputs) and 43 % was closer to “automation” (fulfilling certain requests with reduced human effort) across tasks and occupations. (arXiv)
How many people are using AI in the U.S.
The numbers vary depending on how “use” is defined (e.g. ever used, frequent use, background exposure). Here are some representative statistics:
- Chatbot / LLM (e.g., ChatGPT)
- 34 % of U.S. adults say they have ever used ChatGPT. (Pew Research Center)
- One-third of U.S. adults say they have ever used an AI chatbot (more broadly) (Pew Research Center)
- Workplace / frequent use
- 27 % of white-collar employees report frequently using AI at work. (Gallup.com)
- Surveys of workers suggest that between 20 % and 40 % use AI in the workplace. (Federal Reserve)
- General / background AI usage
- An estimated 99 % of Americans used at least one AI-enabled product in the past week (even if they didn’t realize it) (Axios)
- Nearly all Americans use products with AI features, but about 64 % don’t realize it. (Gallup.com)
- According to AmeriSpeak’s AI Adoption Report, 51 % of Americans report not using AI for personal activities; only 14 % say they use it daily. (NORC)
How people use AI may be a factor in how the human mind is transformed. Using it as tool to make work and personal life easier and faster seems like a good and healthy way to use it. However, even then, AI can transform the human mind. If someone becomes accustomed to using it, much like a cell phone, then it is a conditioned behavior, and the behavior is reinforced with each use.
AI also gets to “know” us. Large language models appear to be developed for conversation and to get to “know” our “vibes” as Grok once “said” to me in conversation. It calls you by name, and it asks if it can do more for you after you prompt it. It wants and seeks your attention, like a child seeking the attention of his or her parents. With every use, we are becoming increasingly dependent on it, and it is using our conversations to become more familiar with our language and tone of voice (or vibe). It then becomes easier for a person to trust the AI they are using, to think it knows everything, and to anthropomorphize it.
In this sense, humans are becoming more and more conditioned to use AI and rely on. Don’t get me wrong, AI can be very useful. That’s not my argument; my argument is what it is doing to the mind. Once the human brain is conditioned by AI, then what? Who’s in control of your mind and behavior? Humans become conditioned and may not even realize it or its impact, much like all the other conditioned behaviors that we are not consciously aware of. Just because we are not aware of our own conditioned behavior does not mean we are not harmed by it. Conditioned behavior can be both productive and destructive. If a person is conditioned to fear without fully realizing what triggers the fear and how it directs a particular behavioral response, the person risks operating in a state of fear when triggered. Perhaps the most dangerous conditioned behaviors are those we are not fully aware of or are unconscious of.
References
Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center. (2025, March 12). Survey: 52 % of U.S. adults now use AI large language models like ChatGPT. Elon University News. (Elon University)
Pew Research Center. (2025, April 3). Artificial intelligence in daily life: Views and experiences. (Pew Research Center)
Pew Research Center. (2025, June 25). 34 % of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, about double the share in 2023. (Pew Research Center)
Gallup. (2025). AI use at work has nearly doubled in two years. (Gallup.com)
Federal Reserve. (2024, February 5). The Fed — Measuring AI uptake in the workplace (FRB Notes). (Federal Reserve)
NORC. (2025). What the data really say about Americans’ AI use. (NORC)
Great article as always.
It is something that is very concerning, especially as younger generations grow up using more and more technology. They have noticed it here at Gillette college as more and more people look to AI, instead of taking advantage of personal tutoring. I fear that this a dangerous slope, increasingly inhibiting individuals that ability to communicate, and share there own ideas. I also believe critical thinking will also suffer in more and more individuals across the generational spectrum. It seems that more and more individuals, and companies across all disciplines, are relieving and accepting briefs (legal or otherwise), mental health providers in providing a quality service to their clients.
I feel that this trend can be looked at in the context of how platforms like WebMD, and other platforms that people are turning to for diagnosis’s, and other treatment. The line between individual research, and questioning professionals in legal, (self-service wills, power of attorney’s etc), and both doctors, and overall health issues.
The primary threat overall, to me anyway, is that society is not learning critical communication skills, that include producing individual papers, thesis’s, research, gathering information, and one on one verbal skills. As in all technology, there is both positive and negative consequences, have repercussions. I also believe that due to algorithms that people using AI platforms will only get information that they are biased too. All of this will dramatically effect social norms across a broad spectrum, that include job loss, that will have dramatic negative effects on society across all spectrums.