She asked people to write down their AI secrets. The confessions poured in.

Olivia Tai stood in a San Jose mall with her bright red sign and proclaimed, “Everyone has an AI secret.”

Two teenage girls walked up, their arms full of shopping bags. They quickly scribbled down their confessions and chatted with Tai in their Valley Girl affection. Tai asked how they used AI at school.

“Everyone is using AI, and if you don’t use it, you’re an overachiever,” the girls told her.

Tai wasn’t just fishing for technical secrets. The 26-year-old from San Francisco was developing her art project, called ‘What We Tell AI’. She asked strangers across the country to leave anonymous notes about their AI-related shame – and then showed them a website.

Americans are forming increasingly personal relationships with AI. A September survey from Elon University and YouGov found that 27% of adult internet users in the US had “significant emotional or social interactions” with AI.

Tai saw this firsthand. The project turned her into a sort of radio host who took late-night calls, she said. Friends told her about their ChatGPT written wedding vows; strangers told her they had lied to their managers about AI.

“I didn’t know the impact this project would have on people,” she said. “What I’m learning is that sometimes the poignancy of a single, very clear story in the form of a note can even spread much more dialogue.”

The origin of the project

Tai was tired of people turning into “debate kids” when they talked about AI.

In the summer of 2025, she organized a series of workshops in New York and San Francisco about the impact of AI on the world. She noticed that people would become too abstract or think too far into the future.

So she introduced the confessions. At the beginning of the workshop, she asked participants to write down a secret about their relationship with AI. They put the notes in a bowl, mixed them, redistributed them, and had everyone read the confessions out loud.

“It really makes the commitment personal,” she said. “It makes things real.”

After a few workshops, she thought the confessions would make a good art project. She set up a prototype in San Francisco Dolores Parkwith a cardboard box and a Sharpie written sign.

One comment that day particularly struck her. It was about cloning an ex-boyfriend’s voice to “have a final connection with him.” The AI ​​cloning “finally helped me move forward,” the note said.

Tai found it ‘poignant’ and ‘strange’ – and decided to turn it into a real art project in several cities.

She painted a wooden sign bright red. “It’s meant to be provocative,” Tai said. She would load it into her grandma cartalong with an instruction folder and a photo frame containing six sample notes.

Not everyone understood. Some would leave confessions about long lost loves without an AI relationship. Others left joke notes. Still, she received a lot of thoughtful responses.

After collecting the notes, Tai stored them in small plastic bags, organized by where they were written. She then uploaded them to her site, designed by her friend Arin Pantja.

Tai is still scanning the notes, so the site is constantly being updated and can continue to grow. People are asking Tai if they can contribute and complete the experiment in Mexico, Australia and China, she said.

An unscientific study

Tai called the project a “snapshot”. San Francisco.

It’s not that she just collected data from the city; she jumped between San Francisco, San Jose and New York. Rather, it is about the spirit of the confessors.

“You don’t come to the booth if you don’t have an active relationship with AI,” she said. “I find myself in a lot of spaces where there will be early adopters.”

Of the cities, San Francisco had the boldest responses. In New York Luddite community“It’s a shame to say you wrote an email with AI,” Tai said. In the Bay Area, those are table stakes.

Some San Francisco confessors wondered if she was doing market research for an AI company. “People working in AI would be scared and a little bit suspicious,” Tai said.

She compared it to New York, where people were afraid they were… content creatorand filmed them as they wrote.

Tai calls herself an ‘artist-researcher’. She later makes it clear that she identifies more with the artist’s title, but that the process of collecting notes felt like an “anthropological, ethnographic snapshot.”

She’s not an expert, Tai said, and she doesn’t tell people to “get some takeout.” Instead, she asks people to think more deeply about the “slippery slope” of AI.

“There are all these new standards coming,” Tai said. “Which one do we actually want?”