In September 2025, San Francisco artist Olivia Tai set up a makeshift confession booth in Mission Dolores Park with a cardboard sign that read: “Confessions Box: Tell Me Your AI Secret.” She expected a few notes about email drafting. Instead, she got a note that changed the course of her project: “I cloned my ex’es voice to have a last conversation with him. And it helped me finally move on. 10/10 recommend.”
That three-sentence confession—anonymous, handwritten, and deeply personal—convinced Tai she had to keep collecting. Her project, “What We Tell AI,” has since traveled to more than 20 sites across the Bay Area, New York City, Denver, and beyond, gathering over 350 handwritten notes from parks, malls, conferences, and workshops, according to the project’s website.
Tai, 26, says the confessions offer an “ethnographic snapshot” of how people are navigating the messy, unregulated terrain of AI in their daily lives. The notes run the gamut from pride to guilt, from heartbreak to outright fear.
What people confess
Dating and breakup confessions are among the most common submissions, Tai says. People use AI to write Hinge messages, get over “situationships,” practice asking someone out, or even maintain AI boyfriends and girlfriends—the latter a category Tai says she’s seen more of than she expected.
But the project has also surfaced darker notes of shame. One submission from a student read: “I used AI for basically all of my school and feel like I don’t deserve my degree.” Another, from Palo Alto, confessed: “Forgive my sin: I talk to AI way more than to ALL people in my life combined,” accompanied by a frowning face.
Some confessions come from those who avoid the technology entirely. A San Francisco note read: “I’ve never used AI. I’m scared to contribute to our own downfall.” Others challenge assumptions: In a city full of pro-AI tech workers, Tai once received a note from someone who pretended to use AI at work because their employer forced it, despite personally being against it.
Why AI confessions resonate
Tai’s project arrives as AI use becomes mainstream. According to a Pew Research Center survey cited by CNBC Make It, about half of U.S. adults now report using AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Microsoft’s Copilot, up from one in three in mid-2024. Roughly one in four adults now use these tools daily.
The confessions reflect a broader trend: people turning to AI for emotional and social support. Research from the AI Observatory analyzed over 24,000 annotated AI conversations from 2023 to 2026 and found people increasingly use chatbots for questions about health and relationships.
A recent poll from Elon University researchers and The Washington Post found that 27% of Americans use AI chatbots to discuss personal, emotional, or social topics, with users under 50 more likely to do so. Nearly 4 in 10 of those users said they’ve told AI things they wouldn’t tell other people, and many said talking to AI made them feel less alone.
Privacy and social atrophy
Tai worries about what happens when intimate thoughts go to a data center instead of to another person. “If you would normally resolve this conflict by being in conversation with another human,” she said, “what happens when AI is one of those quote unquote ‘people’ that you talk to?”
Large language models perform better with more detail, which encourages users to share their deepest fears and hopes. But when that energy goes into an LLM rather than into human relationships, Tai believes those relationships can suffer. Socieally, she said, that “is probably quite negative, because [personal information] is going straight into a data center rather than your neighbors or your family members.”
Public sentiment is shifting too. According to Pew, a growing share of Americans now predict AI will be bad rather than good for society, and younger adults under 30 are especially critical.
Anonymity as a starting point
Tai’s goal is not merely to collect dirty laundry. She wants to normalize conversations about AI use, breaking through the shame and extreme discourse—from those who want AI nannies to neo-Luddites pining for dumb phones. “There are tons of people in the middle afraid to voice their own thoughts because you feel that you’re going to be shamed or penalized by it,” she said.
By offering a safe, anonymous outlet, the project lets people admit their habits without judgment. Tai hopes that as secrecy fades, people can move on to bigger issues like how AI is trained and where data centers are built. “If we’re at a point where no one ever talks about [how they use AI] because they’re ashamed,” she said, “we might as well just get to the point of talking about it. And then we can be more comfortable and honest and get to the bigger abstract [issues].”
CNBC Select is editorially independent and may earn a commission from affiliate partners on links.
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/06/artists-ai-secrets-project-collects-hundreds-of-anonymous-confessions.html
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Do your own research and consult a licensed professional before making financial decisions.
