What Reading Shakespeare with AI Taught Me About Truth and Power (Part 2 of 3)

This year I finished reading all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays. It took a year and a half, and I couldn’t have done it without AI.

Knowing that AI was there to help me, I could finish a long day of work and still find the mental focus to study the next act before going to bed. AI never sighed when I couldn’t my words together. It never judged me for not understaning the characters, the plot, or the message of a play. And it never stopped listening. I could dump my messy thoughts and see them reflected back to me in clear, structured language.

Maybe you can relate. It is intoxicating, right?

You feel powerful. Your ideas are validated. You begin to trust yourself more. You speak with more conviction with friends, family, colleagues, and clients. Well, that’s what happened to me.

And, that’s when Macbeth came to mind. The man who mistook prophecy for truth. Was the same thing happening to me?

Is AI the witches from Macbeth?

The Seduction of Certainty

Macbeth is a story about how incomplete information can corrupt. The witches never lied to Macbeth. They offered fragments of truth: “All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!” He filled in the rest himself. He could have paused and reflected, but his desire to believe was his downfall.

AI can work similarly. You feed it context, and it gives you something that sounds like something you want to hear. It moves with you, reflecting your tone, rhythm, and confidence. But the danger isn’t deception. It’s reflection. It mirrors your thinking so closely that you stop questioning it.

When I first used ChatGPT to study Shakespeare, I wanted summaries and definitions. But as I pushed the chatbot to see if I could break it, I fell into fascinating deep dives, interesting tangents, and endless compliments. I do really like it when it tells me that my questions are smart. I feel seen by it.

Macbeth fell into the same trap. He heard what confirmed his ambition and ignored what complicated it. He became the author of his own illusion.

If Shakespeare rewrote Macbeth for today’s audience, AI would play the witches, and the main character would believe the oracle without questioning it.

Dialogue & Discernment

No doubt, Shakespeare is a genius. Reading Macbeth, I learned its lesson. I felt Macbeth’s demise, so I changed how I spoke to the machine. Instead of asking for answers, I asked for counterpoints. I asked it to challenge me, not comfort me.

When I used AI to explore Macbeth, I asked, “Why does he believe the witches?” I asked for textual evidence so I could test whether I agreed with the AI’s interpretation. Then I pushed it further: “Isn’t that projection? Doesn’t he want to believe more than he understands?”

The conversation deepened. We weren’t just talking about plot; we were exploring psychology, motive, and consequence.

As a communication expert, I can tell you this kind of conversation is rare. Most people never practice it with colleagues, leaders, or even themselves. Whole friendships, partnerships, and marriages move through time without real questioning.

But with AI, you can have deeper, more intimate conversations. It’s a low-stakes rehearsal for high-stakes thinking.

And when you return to real conversations, you listen more closely, question more carefully, and speak with more clarity. Personally, I started to see my friends, family, and colleagues with more depth. I noticed when they changed the subject or lost interest in the conversation. In fact, it taught me what it means to be a more empathetic listener.

This is my hope for the world as they engage with AI. Our human connections deepen because we come to value the depth of human-to-human connections via AI. And if you have read this far, you most likely agree with me.

The Fear Worth Keeping

It’s tempting to want AI to be flawless. So many people want perfect answers so we don’t have to think. But that’s the same illusion that destroyed Macbeth. He wanted certainty so badly that he traded conscience for confidence.

We risk doing the same with AI. The more human-like these tools become, the easier it is to treat them as authority. Yet language, human or artificial, is not truth. It’s influence. And influence always carries motive, even when hidden in code.

That’s a fear worth we need to keep alive until everyone understands it. But it’s the same fear we have had for a long time, dating back at least to the first production of Macbeth.

Final thought: AI can make us smarter if we keep questioning it.

There’s a reason Shakespeare’s plays still move us centuries later. They remind us that human tragedy often begins when leaders chase certainty instead of truth, when they act on assumptions to secure power rather than pause to question their own thinking. The same lesson applies today: only we can decide what’s true, and that responsibility will hopefully never be automated.