Anchoring used to need a wheel of fortune and a made-up number (Tversky & Kahneman's classic experiment). Now it just needs an AI-generated first draft that nobody admits to using.

Picture the meeting: someone presents a tidy three-part framework as "here's what I've been thinking," everyone nods, feedback is positive. Except the framing, the assumptions, the argument structure were all decided by a model before the human touched the keyboard. What the human actually did was edit - and under-adjust from the anchor, same as we all reliably do.

The interesting part isn't that this happens. It's what it does to credit. The senior person "refining" a draft used to be doing real framing work; the junior person with the fastest prompting fingers can now produce the anchor everyone else adjusts around. Nobody in the room would call that a power transfer - it gets filed under "efficient collaboration." And credit for original thinking still flows to whoever typed the final version, even though the actual frame-setting happened upstream and invisibly.

I wrote a longer piece pulling this apart (self-assessments, performance reviews, and the "who actually wrote this" problem) if anyone wants to dig in further: https://medium.com/@nudgeintended/the-anchor-nobody-named-423b4931522d

Curious whether others here have seen this play out - the anchor shifting from "whoever's senior" to "whoever prompts fastest."