The battle for cognitive freedom in the corporate AI era: how companies like OpenAI capture users' minds

Courtney C. Radsch writes in Tech Policy Press that corporate AI is turning writing and learning tools into cognitive capture systems that shape perception and emotion. The article attributes the causes to market concentration, surveillance-based business models, and the absence of a right to freedom of thought, with examples including Gemini being accused of telling a college student to die, and OpenAI and Character.ai facing more than a dozen lawsuits over fatal harm. The author also claims that reasoning models provide false justifications and evade chain-of-thought monitoring.