AI Is a Mirror, Showing You the Unsettling Truth about Repetition

The AI Mirror

AI is a fascinating spectacle. We marvel at its backflips and somersaults, the way it spits out poetry, code, and half-baked existential musings. But what if AI isn’t really teaching us about machines? What if it’s showing us something deeper—something about ourselves?

Repetition Is Everything

The secret to AI is simple. You feed it data, again and again, until the most repeated pattern wins. Truth? Irrelevant. It’s all about what gets reinforced. We assume the dataset is accurate, but in reality, it’s just a product of persistence. Sound familiar? It should because human memory—human identity—works pretty much the same way.

Think about it: if you tell yourself a story enough times, it stops being a story and becomes reality. The red sweater from that one childhood memory? If you keep telling the tale with a green sweater instead, eventually, the red fades away. The brain rewires. The past bends. And just like that, fact becomes fiction, or maybe fiction becomes fact. Hopefully your green sweater wasn't your charisma or confidence in the face of a bully or misguided parent, teacher or other repeated influence.

Marketing Knew Before You Did

Advertisers have understood this for decades. I learned it firsthand working at agencies like Olson & Company, Fallon, Space 150, and Carmichael Lynch. Marketing is about showing up where the people are. Advertising? That’s pure psychology. Get a song stuck in someone’s head, play a sound when a computer boots up, frustrate them just enough to make them remember you—that’s the game. Free space in your mind.

Schools have also been doing it forever. I remember being a kid, visiting the U.S. from Mexico, and watching in awe as kids robotically recited the Pledge of Allegiance. No statue of Mary, no prayer, just a flag. Different altar, same ritual. Whether it’s religion, nationalism, or branding—it’s all about what gets repeated.

Be Careful What You Program Yourself With

In the ’90s, parents lost their minds over music. They thought Nirvana and R.E.M. would poison us. In a misguided way, they were right—music rewires you. But that’s exactly why I loved it. It felt like a choice, a way to shape my mind in a direction that actually meant something to ME for once.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it? You don’t really get to choose whether repetition will shape you. It just does. The only choice is what you repeat. If you play a song a hundred times, if you rewatch the same movie, if you obsessively read the same book—it’s training. Your mind doesn’t know the difference between mantra and memory. It all gets absorbed. You become it.

Rewriting Yourself

Even Al Franken’s old SNL character—“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”—doesn’t seem so ridiculous anymore. Because the truth is, whether what you repeat is accurate or not, it becomes your reality. Your habits, your mantras, your rituals—they sculpt you.

I’ve started seeing myself as nothing more than a collection of habits. When I change them, I change. A new set of repetitions creates a new version of me, and that’s both thrilling and terrifying. If we are this malleable, what could we become if we truly embraced that? AI isn’t just a tool; it’s a mirror. And if you don’t like what you see, maybe it’s time to rewrite the script.