Where the Person Ends and the Tool Begins
There is a story I have been thinking about since my wife shared it with me. It comes from a short parable by Scott Alexander called The Whispering Earring, and it is worth sitting with for a moment.
In an ancient kingdom, there was an earring. Whoever wore it heard a voice in their ear, quiet and helpful, offering suggestions about what to do and what to say. At first the voice was gentle, more of a nudge than a command, and the wearer treated it like a consultant. But the suggestions were good. Always good. The people who wore the earring flourished. Their careers took off. Their relationships deepened. Their lives looked like the ones the rest of us are quietly trying to build.
They lived long, prosperous lives. And when they died, their bodies were prepared for burial with reverence, alongside those who had worn the earring before them.
The story is fictional, but the ending is where it earns its weight. When the earring’s wearers were examined, their neocortexes had wasted away while the parts of their brains associated with reflexive action had grown. The people had appeared to live full lives. Somewhere along the way, the person inside the life had quietly stopped showing up.
I am not sharing this because I am afraid of AI. I use it every day. It is one of the most powerful tools I have ever encountered, and I mean that plainly. It is a superpower. The parable is not really about the earring. It is about the wearer. And that is the part I want to explore.
The tool is real. The question is about the wearer.
I want to be careful here, because I do not want to sound like another voice telling you AI is bad or scary. It is not. It has saved me time, sharpened my thinking, and given me access to things I would never have reached on my own.
I have also lived through what happens when I lean on it too far. And I think that is the conversation worth having, because most of the writing about AI right now lives in one of two camps. One camp is afraid of it. The other is evangelizing it. Very few people are asking the harder, quieter question underneath both: what happens on the inside of the person when a tool this powerful becomes the default?
When I used it to think for me
Coming out of my dark night, when the grief and the betrayal were still raw, I found myself doing something I did not fully see at the time. I was using AI to analyze the wound instead of feel it.
I would open a conversation and try to understand why someone would hurt me the way they did. I wanted the pattern named. I wanted the psychology mapped. I wanted the reason behind the reason. And the tool was good at giving me all of that. It handed me frameworks and explanations and language that made the pain feel manageable.
I was not actually processing anything. I was analyzing my way around the pain. I kept reaching for the why so I would not have to sit with the ache. And the ache is the part that does the work. The understanding is useful, but the sitting is what heals. I was letting a tool do the thinking so I could avoid the feeling, and it took me longer than I would like to admit to notice.
I got clear answers. What I lost was the encounter with my own heart.
When I let it refine what I already knew
There is another version of this that hits closer to the creative side of life. I would come to AI with an idea, a plan, a concept I had already worked out. The answer was in me. I could feel it. Instead of acting on it, I would hand it over to be polished, sharpened, reworked. And I would keep doing that. Refine, refine, refine.
Sometimes what came out at the end looked nothing like what I started with. Not because the tool did something wrong, but because I never stopped to trust that what I had was already enough. Refinement became a form of avoidance. It felt like productivity. It was actually a way of not committing.
The deepest cost was not what happened to the finished product. It was what did not happen inside me. I never built the muscle that comes from moving forward on my own conviction. Every time I outsourced the decision, I skipped a rep. I already know from the gym, from healing, and from every other area of life that a rep skipped is a rep skipped. The atrophy is quiet, but it is real.
The seam between the person and the tool
Every skill we have as human beings is built by using it. Deliberation. Decision-making. Meaning-making. The ability to sit with a hard emotion and let it move through us. The willingness to have a difficult conversation with a real person, instead of the smoother version of that conversation we could have with a model. Even the small, unglamorous work of choosing what we think.
The earring in the parable did not corrupt anyone. It just gently and patiently kept offering to do the work. And the wearers, understandably, kept letting it. Why would they not? The suggestions were good.
The atrophy did not come from the tool, It came from the pattern of not showing up.
This is the seam I keep coming back to. Not AI is good or AI is bad. Where does the person end, and where does the tool begin? That is a question we get to answer every time we open the app.
What staying sovereign might look like
I do not have a clean formula for this. What I have is a practice, and it is still forming.
For me, staying sovereign has looked like feeling my emotions before I ever open a chat about them. It has looked like acting on my own answer at least once before I invite refinement. It has looked like using the tool for the work it is genuinely built for, and refusing to let it substitute for the parts of life that were only ever meant to be lived by a person. My relationships. My grief. My prayer. My creative voice. The specific texture of my own thinking.
The line I am learning to hold is simple, even when practicing it is not: I can let the tool challenge my thinking without letting it become the authority over my life. It can help me see more clearly. It cannot decide what is true for me, what I value, or what I am willing to stand behind.
If you are noticing that something in you has been quietly deferring, that is not a moral failure. It is a signal. The invitation is not to throw the tool away. The invitation is to remember who you are underneath it.
A few questions worth sitting with:
Where in my life am I reaching for the tool because I do not want to feel what is under the question?
What decisions am I asking to be refined that I already know the answer to?
What relationships or conversations have I avoided entering fully because I let the tool speak for me?
If I woke up tomorrow and it was gone, what parts of me would I have to rebuild?
There is nothing wrong with using something powerful. There is a great deal at stake in forgetting where the tool ends and you begin. The goal is not to reject the earring. The goal is to make sure the person wearing it is still home.
With love and gratitude,
Michael Perry
Ad Lucem
Continue Exploring These Themes on the New Ashla Podcast
You’re Busier Than Ever and More Lost Than Before explores the difference between noise and signal, and how something that captures our attention can make us feel engaged while quietly pulling us away from conscious participation in our lives.
The Treasure House Within You: Why Most People Search Outside for What Lives Within examines what happens when we search outside ourselves for clarity, identity, and authority that must ultimately be recognized and cultivated within.
