How do you see AI?

Everyone carries a mental model of AI. Most never examine it. But that model shapes everything: how you prompt, what you trust, where you draw the line.

Liu & Yao (2026) surveyed 211 professionals and found four distinct attitude clusters: optimistic pragmatists, neutral observers, skeptical realists, and enthusiastic advocates. Each cluster predicts different prompting behavior. Enthusiastic advocates overwhelmingly prefer co-creative styles (86%). Those who see AI as a tool favor directive approaches (46%). The relationship was statistically significant in essay-writing contexts.

This matters because your mental model is not neutral. It filters what you attempt, what you dismiss, and what you never think to try. Vaccaro et al. (2024, 106 studies) found that human-AI teams often underperform. The difference between complementary and counterproductive depends partly on the lens you bring.