More than 350 people have written down their private AI confessions and handed them, anonymously, to an artist who has spent a year collecting them. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the category of software that can hold a text conversation, answer questions, or generate writing on demand. Olivia Tai's project "What We Tell AI" documents how people are quietly using that technology to navigate dating, work, and daily life in ways they have not disclosed to those around them.
The format is deliberate. Each submission is handwritten on paper and anonymous: no name, no account. People who type questions into a chatbot leave a digital record; people who write those same thoughts on paper and hand them to an artist are doing something different. They are acknowledging, in a physical act, that a secret exists.
The confessions span the areas of life where people feel most uncertain: dating decisions, workplace situations, and the quieter routines of daily living. Each of those is territory people tend to handle privately even without AI involved. Add a conversational software layer and the privacy deepens, because AI does not tell anyone what you asked it.
That is the tension Tai's project sits inside. AI has become a kind of private counsel for decisions people feel uncomfortable surfacing to those close to them. Asking a chatbot whether a text message reads as too eager, or how to handle a situation at home, carries no social cost. Nobody finds out. The confession Tai collects is the moment someone admits that they did it.
Tai collects the handwritten submissions and also shares them publicly. That combination turns a private act into a communal one. One person's admission becomes, once shared, a small confirmation to someone else that the same impulse is widespread. The archive grows both ways: as a record of individual use and as a portrait of how people are actually living with this technology now.
Over 350 handwritten submissions in a year is the archive Tai has assembled. Each piece of paper is anonymous, so no name ever surfaces. The project's premise, in Tai's own framing, is direct: "Everyone has an AI secret."