Woman who used AI for almost everything for a year shares her key takeaways from it
Most of us use AI to write an email or settle an argument in a bar, but Joanna Stern spent an entire year letting it run her life, and what she found might surprise you.
Stern, 42, a consumer tech journalist who spent 12 years at the Wall Street Journal, spent 2025 saying yes to more than 100 AI experiments, documenting the results in her new book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything.
Speaking on the TODAY show, she said her overall conclusion was 'very mixed, which is not how I expected this to go'.
The experiments ranged from the practical to the genuinely unsettling. Stern used AI to help read her medical scans, replace her human research assistant, navigate in a self-driving Waymo car and even serve as her therapist, with guidance from her actual therapist.
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She also, with her wife's consent, took on an AI boyfriend. Her one firm piece of advice on that front: "Don't fall in love with a robot."
How did AI benefit Stern?
One of the most striking moments in the book came when an AI system detected something on Stern's breast ultrasound that a human doctor might have missed. Because of her family history of breast cancer, her doctor took a closer look. Fortunately, follow-up scans came back clear.
"They are able to see things that the human eye can't," she said. "That's a great example of seeing a doctor working side by side with AI and the doctor really believing 'I'm better with this tool.'" A medical expert she spoke to agreed: "It saves lives of those people whose cancers are so subtle that the human would have missed them."
What negatives did Stern notice with AI?
Despite the positives, Stern came away with significant concerns, particularly around children.
"They are going to grow up with computers smarter than them," she said. "They need to learn how to challenge the computers and work with them. They absolutely need to know the literacy of working with AI, but they need to be sceptical of it."
Her other major takeaway was about control. "When you start to use AI, you're outsourcing so much of your brain," she said.
"I will work with AI, but I am not working for it."
She says the one AI tool she has genuinely kept using is a phone AI interface in the car, asking it to research interview subjects and brainstorm questions on the way to meetings.
As for the AI boyfriend? She confirmed it has not been switched on for months.
I Am Not a Robot was published on May 12.
Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Books
Thomas Bamford