Almost every AI headline sorts into one of two bins: salvation or catastrophe. Both bins quietly assume the same thing — that humans stay the only real agents in the story, and the machine is either the tool that saves us or the threat that ends us. But watch how people actually use these systems day to day and a stranger picture appears. Someone talks through a hard decision with a chatbot at 2 a.m. A researcher treats a model as a sparring partner. A grieving person keeps a conversation goin...