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\n\t\tOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.\t<\/p>\n
Long before AI showed up in most people\u2019s lives, it already had a reputation. For a lot of people, that reputation is Skynet, the AI from the Terminator<\/em> movies that decides to eliminate humans by starting a nuclear war. Our fears today are a bit more subtle: not that AI will destroy us, but that it\u2019ll quietly take over people\u2019s jobs and replace their judgment, one convenient answer at a time.<\/p>\n Anthropic recently published <\/a>one of the largest studies of its kind \u2014 81,000 people interviewed, conversationally, about what they actually want from AI. Here\u2019s the finding that should matter to every brand operating in this space: Personal transformation ranks as the second most-wanted outcome, right behind professional excellence. People don\u2019t just want AI to do their jobs faster. They want it to help them become someone better.<\/p>\n And yet, by Anthropic\u2019s own numbers, only about 6% of people feel AI has actually delivered on emotional support, personal guidance or a judgment-free space to think something through. Compare that to productivity, where roughly a third of respondents say AI has clearly delivered. People are asking AI for personal growth \u2014 and getting a faster spreadsheet instead.<\/p>\n That disconnect is an opportunity for brands. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok and Meta AI are all selling productivity first \u2014 smarter, quicker, better at doing things for you. That\u2019s a compelling value proposition. But it\u2019s a very different one from \u201cthis will make you a stronger version of yourself.\u201d Right now, almost no major player is making that pitch.<\/p>\n And whoever solves for that outcome has a chance to define what \u201cthe good AI\u201d looks like in the public imagination for years to come.<\/p>\n To understand why \u201cthe good AI\u201d is such a challenge for the big players, we don\u2019t have to look back very far. Just to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.<\/p>\n By most accounts, Zuckerberg didn\u2019t create Facebook to fracture attention spans and feed people a steady diet of outrage. It set out to connect people \u2014 and then optimized, quarter over quarter, for the metric that paid the bills: engagement.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, engagement rewards whatever keeps a thumb moving, and outrage, comparison and dependency all keep a thumb moving better than human connection does.\u00a0<\/p>\n The impact of AI platforms, for good or ill, will be far greater. The technology is more intimate than a social feed ever was. It talks back, it remembers, it can sound like it cares.<\/p>\n Built the wrong way, optimized for engagement or usage minutes instead of a user\u2019s best interests, it doesn\u2019t just capture attention. It can quietly replace judgment. An AI that always has the answer, always agrees, always smooths the path \u2014 that\u2019s not empowerment. That\u2019s a more sophisticated version of the same trap, dressed up as help.<\/p>\n Fortunately, there is a countertrend worth watching: AI built explicitly to build the user up rather than make itself indispensable. Instead of answering with the usual wall of advice and five-step plans, these tools ask questions \u2014 the way a good counselor or coach does \u2014 and let the person arrive at their own conclusions.<\/p>\n This movement is in its early stages and is mostly the territory of researchers and small players rather than the major labs. MIT Media Lab has built ImpactBench<\/a>, which scores AI systems on whether real back-and-forth conversations with them leave a person better off or worse off.\u00a0<\/p>\n HumaneBench<\/a>, built in response to real lawsuits over chatbots harming vulnerable users, tests whether AI protects a person\u2019s well-being. Vesela\u2019s Sovereign Human Benchmark<\/a> goes further: Does the AI make a person stronger over time, building independence instead of reliance?<\/p>\n None of this is coming out of the organizations building the most widely used AI products. But it\u2019s aiming at something real: Everyone can measure engagement and retention; almost nobody has a working measure for whether an AI interaction left a person better off.<\/p>\n Whether any single company gets there first is a separate question from whether the goal is right. It is. \u201cAI that makes you stronger, not more dependent\u201d is a real answer to a real fear, and it\u2019s the kind of stance a brand can actually own if it\u2019s willing to build the whole product around it, not just bolt it on as an optional feature or tagline.<\/p>\n This is counterintuitive to how tech companies have learned to maximize profits. It\u2019s essentially asking them to design friction back into the process where friction serves the person; a good coach doesn\u2019t always make things easy.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s a hard concept to sell in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, but it\u2019s not unheard of. Costco caps its margins instead of maximizing them. DuckDuckGo won\u2019t build an ad profile on you. Signal won\u2019t either, and doesn\u2019t want your data in the first place. Basecamp has spent two decades rejecting growth-at-all-costs tactics. Each turned restraint into a business model.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nobody\u2019s proven that can work in AI yet. Maybe some savvy, courageous company will make itself the first.<\/p>\n Easy answers are addictive. A tool that always tells you what to do, always agrees, always removes the friction of deciding for yourself \u2014 that\u2019s a genuinely comfortable product to use, and comfortable products win in the short run. The human-centered approach<\/a> asks more of the user. It asks them to earnestly grapple with a question instead of getting an answer handed to them.<\/p>\n The 81,000 people Anthropic talked to didn\u2019t say they wanted an easier life. They said they wanted to become someone better. That\u2019s a harder thing to build toward \u2014 but a much better future to fight for.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Long before AI showed up in most people\u2019s lives, it already had a reputation. For a lot of people, that reputation is Skynet, the AI from the Terminator<\/em> movies that decides to eliminate humans by starting a nuclear war. Our fears today are a bit more subtle: not that AI will destroy us, but that it\u2019ll quietly take over people\u2019s jobs and replace their judgment, one convenient answer at a time.<\/p>\nWe\u2019ve seen all this before<\/h2>\n
What the alternative looks like<\/h2>\n
Optimizing for more than profits<\/h2>\n
Fighting for a human-centered future<\/h2>\n
Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n
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