The other day I saw a reel on Instagram about artificial intelligence (AI) and how it’s increasingly become omnipresent in day-to-day life.

Now, I don’t really want to get into why the reel thought this was happening (partially as I’ve yet to fact-check it or do my own research) or the ethical questions surrounding AI, but I did want to talk about something interesting that reel brought up: the growing involvement of AI in every facet of our lives.

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When it comes to talking about AI, there’s not really one place to start.

There’s the fact that you can’t Google anything or click on any follow-up questions without the first thing to come up being an AI overview, which is well and good until you struggle to find where the AI is getting its information from.

Then, there’s the fact that Instagram is allowing AI to auto-translate reels in non-English languages – something I experienced the hard way a few weeks ago – with no user input (annoying because I can usually understand the “foreign” language) in what is frankly starting to feel like a creepy imitation of the creator’s original voice and inflection.

Never mind the fact that tools like Instagram and YouTube have had auto-generated captions for quite a while now.

Another unnerving development is the lack of… identification that a tool or program is AI. For example, when I – as someone who’s on Libby 24/7  – was messing around on the reading app, I discovered a tool that would give you personalized recommendations for books based on your current taste, mood, genre preferences, etc.

It wasn’t until quite a while later that I saw that the program was AI, and not some clever form of cataloguing. Again: well and good until you look at it in context, which is that it’s everywhere.

Lots of people (and I think this was discussed in the aforementioned reel as well) like to liken AI to a tool: something to reduce your workload, take care of the mundane, and make it easier to get things done and live your life. In fact, in a conversation with my parents just Monday night, they compared the rise of AI to that of the Internet, arguing that it was just part of progress or the natural development of technology.

I’m not so certain. After all, how can something be a tool if you have no recollection of picking it up to use? Even when it comes to our cell phones or the Internet or Google or social media, we know what we’re doing: we know we’re unlocking our phones, we know we’re opening a search engine, we know we’re interacting with curated posts that were made to be seen.

But with AI, it’s beginning to feel like that distinction is blurring. The active choice to use this so-called “tool” has started to disappear, and there’s neither a way to “opt-in” nor easily “opt-out” any more.

To put it bluntly, maybe it’s time to consider that there’s More to the Story on how much we’ve integrated AI into our lives and question if it truly deserves – or needs – to be accepted into every dimension of them.