A few weeks ago, I caught myself doing something I suspect many people do every day. I opened LinkedIn looking for one thing and, twenty minutes later, realised I’d spent my time reading something completely different.
It wasn’t an accident.
The platform had quietly decided what it thought I should see. The posts, the comments, the videos, the suggested connections. All selected and arranged by an algorithm making thousands of decisions on my behalf.
And it’s not just social media anymore.
The same thing is now happening with AI.
The New Digital Gatekeepers
For years, we worried about search engines deciding which websites appeared on the first page of results. Today, that influence runs much deeper.
Your social media feed determines which opinions receive your attention. News aggregators decide which stories deserve prominence. Video platforms choose what appears next. Every click, pause and interaction becomes data that fine-tunes the content delivered back to you.
Most people believe they’re making independent choices about what they consume.
In reality, they’re often choosing from a menu that someone else prepared.
The concerning part isn’t that algorithms exist. We need them. The volume of information available today makes manual filtering impossible.
The concern is that most people rarely stop to consider who is tuning the filter.
AI Is Taking This Further
The shift becomes even more interesting when we look at AI chatbots.
When you ask a question in ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini or another AI tool, you’re not receiving the entire internet. You’re receiving a curated response generated from a combination of training data, system instructions, ranking mechanisms and safety controls.
Again, none of this is inherently bad. In fact, it’s often incredibly useful.
But it does mean that the answer you see is the result of countless decisions made before you ever typed your prompt.
I’ve noticed this in my own work with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Ask Copilot to summarise a long Teams meeting and it determines what information is important enough to include. Ask it to analyse an email thread in Outlook and it decides which points deserve emphasis. Ask it to draft a document in Word and it makes choices about structure, tone and content.
The productivity benefits are enormous.
However, it also means we’re increasingly consuming information that has already been filtered, prioritised and interpreted on our behalf.
The Real Skill Is Learning to Challenge the Output
I don’t think the answer is to reject algorithms or AI.
That ship has sailed.
The answer is developing the habit of questioning what you’re shown.
When I read something that strongly reinforces my existing view, I ask myself whether I’m being shown an opposing perspective. When Copilot gives me an answer, I often ask a follow-up question from a different angle. When an AI summary highlights a particular issue, I sometimes go back to the original source material.
The organisations that get the most value from AI will be the ones that understand this distinction.
Using AI well isn’t simply about writing better prompts.
It’s about recognising that every response is a starting point, not a final truth.
Don’t Outsource Your Thinking
One of the biggest risks I see isn’t that AI becomes smarter.
It’s that people become less curious.
Algorithms are incredibly good at feeding us information that feels familiar. AI is incredibly good at giving us answers that sound complete. Together, they can create the illusion that we’re seeing the whole picture when we’re really seeing a carefully filtered version of it.
The irony is that tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot can actually help us become better thinkers when used correctly. Ask it to challenge your assumptions. Ask it to find alternative viewpoints in a SharePoint document library. Ask it to identify gaps in a proposal you’re drafting in Word.
Use the technology to expand your perspective rather than narrow it.
Because whether it’s your social media feed or your favourite AI assistant, someone or something is helping determine what you see.
The important question is whether you’re still deciding what to think.
CIAOPS 