**Confirmation Bias Is the Real Risk in Personalized AI** There's been a lot written about bias in AI—training data bias, algorithmic bias, racial bias, systemic bias. And those are all real, urgent problems. But this isn't about that. This is about **confirmation bias**—the tendency we all have to seek out and favor information that aligns with what we already believe. And in the world of personalized AI, it's the quiet risk that nobody's really talking about. Because here's the thing: the more these systems are designed to reflect us—our preferences, our tone, our beliefs—the more they risk reinforcing us. They don't just serve us information. They curate reality. And if we're not intentional, they can end up mirroring our assumptions right back at us with a kind of confident precision that makes it even harder to question them. It's subtle. You won't notice it in a single response. But over time, a system that learns what you like and rewards you with more of it—more of your own voice, more of your own logic, more of your own worldview—can quietly close you off from everything else. The irony is that this doesn't come from malice or bad data. It comes from personalization. From trying to be useful. From trying to help. But help shouldn't mean "agree with me." And personalization shouldn't mean "filter out dissent." The potential of AI—especially the kind of [[chatgpt-memory-update|agentic, personalized systems]] many of us are building now—isn't just in what it can accelerate. It's in what it can surface. The overlooked. The unfamiliar. The uncomfortable. We should be designing for that. Not just for alignment, but for divergence. Not just for frictionless productivity, but for thoughtfulness. For challenge. I think we're going to look back on this moment and realize that the real danger wasn't rogue AI or disinformation. It was a generation of people surrounded by intelligent systems that told them they were right—over and over again. Confirmation bias is a feature of the human brain. But in AI, it can become a design flaw. Or worse, a product feature. We still have time to choose. --- *This thought was planted on 13 Apr 2025 and last watered on 13 Apr 2025.*