Eyes Open

The truth about chatbots

AI is useful, fast, and often impressive. It can help you think, learn, draft, and organise. What it is not, automatically, is an expert, a search engine, a doctor, a therapist, an adviser, or a friend. It can give you an answer that sounds confident and kind and is still out of date, incomplete, misread, or badly wrong.

Here is a plain model of what is happening when you type, and a checklist for using it with your eyes open.

Every quote on this page was opened at source on 18 September 2026