Edison Earl excels at his job as a graduate intern at Arts University Bournemouth in England. He’s produced more marketing content than ever for the school and doubled its Instagram followers in the last seven months.

But he struggles to take credit, since the ChatGPT app did much of the work. In the last two years he’s gone from brainstorming on paper to talking to ChatGPT most of the day. "Can you rewrite this email for me?” he’ll ask it. "What do you think of this social media post and this event?” And it not just work; the 23-year-old enlists its help in everything from choosing what to eat to what clothes to buy.

Earl freely admits that he’s become dependent on the tool launched by OpenAI in late 2022, now regularly used by more than 400 million people. It and similar software, including Gemini from Alphabet’s Google or Anthropic’s Claude, are marketed as digital interns or research assistants. The downside for actual interns and new starters I’ve spoken to: Some are becoming overly reliant on artificial intelligence, muddying the path to seniority, undermining their self-confidence and heightening their imposter syndrome. "I was trusting it so much that I lost faith in my own decisions and thought process,” Earl says.