If you use a private AI tool to draft your emails faster, that is your choice. If a school, court, or welfare office uses a private AI tool to decide what happens to you, that is a different category of decision entirely. Right now, those lines are blurring. Governments and public institutions are under pressure to be “modern” and “data-driven”, and AI products are being marketed as the quickest way there. It is easy enough to plug in a commercial model to rank applications,

Over the last year, AI has gone from a side project to a headline phrase in almost every corporate strategy document. Surveys suggest that AI adoption is now mainstream. A McKinsey survey in 2024 found that 65% of organisations are regularly using generative AI, nearly double the share from ten months earlier ( McKinsey & Company, 2024 ). The 2025 AI Index reports that 78% of organisations worldwide used some form of AI in 2024, up from 55% the year before ( Stanford Institut

If arguments on the internet feel different lately or if they seem faster, sharper, and more circular, you are not imagining it. AI, rather than being another participant in these arguments, is increasingly becoming the stage manager. Most online arguments now start long before you type anything. They start when a recommender system decides what shows up in your feed. A 2024 PNAS Nexus study calls recommendation algorithms a force that “profoundly shape users’ attention