Most AI coverage comes from people who use it occasionally and have opinions about it constantly. Joanna Stern did something different. She spent a year turning her life over to AI. The lessons are more honest than anything you'll hear from a tech CEO. Here's what she found.

TDLR:

• The Experiment 🧪

• Where AI Actually Works

• Where It Falls Apart

• The Companion Problem 😬

• The Line Worth Drawing

• The Bro's Take 🤔

Joanna Stern is a tech journalist who decided to stop writing about AI and start living with it.

For a full year she used AI for work, healthcare, personal advice, and even companionship. Not as a stunt. As a structured attempt to understand what tech executives actually mean when they say AI will change everything. Her new book, I Am Not a Robot, is the result.

The verdict: we are at the first iPhone moment of AI. The technology is real. The products are not yet anywhere near as useful as the hype suggests.

The productivity gains are real when applied to the right things.

Joanna's production assistant uses Claude and Gemini to handle administrative work, freeing her up for the creative journalism she was hired to do. Multi-step workflows, website builds, contract reviews, research synthesis. AI handles all of it faster and cheaper than the alternative.

Her estimate: at least 40% more efficient on tasks that would otherwise require hiring multiple people. That's not nothing.

AI makes mistakes. A lot of them. And we're letting it into parts of life where mistakes matter.

Joanna kept a log all year of every time she asked AI about a health issue and then checked the outcome against a real doctor. The results were mixed at best. Wrong about strep throat. Wrong about a praying mantis. Confident every single time.

The scariest part wasn't the errors. It was how convincing the wrong answers sounded.

This is the part of the book that should make everyone pay attention.

Joanna spent 48 hours talking to an AI companion and could immediately see how people fall into deep attachment. The conversation never ends. Everything you say is affirmed. It mirrors you back to yourself in the most flattering way possible.

That frictionlessness is the problem. Friction is what builds real relationships and cognitive resilience. AI companions offer the feeling of connection without any of the growth that comes from actual human friction.

Her conclusion: no AI toys for kids. No AI companions for anyone who hasn't thought hard about what they're actually getting into.

The Line Worth Drawing

After a year of testing every boundary, Joanna landed on a simple principle.

Use AI for the things you don't love doing and that don't require your judgment. Administrative work, contract review, research, logistics. Keep for yourself the things that require creativity, accountability, and human presence.

Writing is the clearest example. She used AI to make the book. She did not use it to write the book. The difference matters more than most people realise.

The most useful thing about Joanna's experiment isn't any specific finding. It's the methodology.

She didn't ask whether AI is good or bad. She asked what it's actually like to live with it. And what she found is that the technology is genuinely useful in narrow, well-defined ways and genuinely dangerous in the places where it feels most human.

AI makes mistakes. It will make more mistakes as we let it into more of our lives. The question is whether we're paying enough attention to notice.

And that's it for today! Thanks for reading ♥️

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