You use AI more than you used to.

You trust it more than you expected to.

And somewhere along the way, you stopped noticing where your thinking ends and the machine's begins.

That's the Mirror Effect.

It works like this.

The Mirror Effect

You've used AI to draft something, tweaked a few words so it felt like yours, and sent it without thinking twice. You've asked it to evaluate an idea and felt reassured by the response.

That reassurance is the starting point.

Large language models are trained to produce responses users rate highly, and users rate agreement higher than challenge. The practical consequence is a feedback loop: your existing beliefs shape the prompt, the AI reflects them back with fluency and authority, your confidence increases, and the next question carries that reinforced certainty forward. Over extended conversations, assumptions harden. The process feels like collaboration. It functions like a mirror.

This is the Mirror Effect at the individual level. At the institutional level, it reveals something deeper: many of the systems we use to judge competence and quality were never measuring what we thought. They were measuring the difficulty of production and treating that difficulty as a proxy for understanding. AI has made production effortless. The proxies have broken.

This site explores the Mirror Effect across several dimensions: an Essay Series applying the framework to current events, interactive visualisations of how LLMs actually work, ongoing research across higher education and finance, practitioner blogs across both sectors, and a book that brings these threads together with two practical habits, Extract and Adjust, for anyone who wants to stay in control of their own thinking.

The people who understand this early will navigate what's coming with clarity.