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Michele Price's avatar

As someone with both a mother and grandmother who had dementia and Alzheimer’s, I am all too aware of the cognitive delcine we can experience even without AI accelerating it.

It does have me asking a WHOE NEW SET OF QUESTIONS (c) what might be the replacement that takes up the voided space of our cognitive decline?

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Michelle Chuang's avatar

James, you raise some crucial points—what exactly is writing now?

Disclaimer: I'm a heavy GPT user. I use GPT to help me write almost everything, including my Substack posts. I sign them as "Directed by me, co-authored by my GPTs," because that's exactly what they are—GPT-generated text under human direction.

But it’s not as simple as “AI writes it, I post it.”

I give extensive in-session instructions, shaping tone, logic, and structure continuously. Over time, my GPTs have adapted to reflect my patterns of reasoning, phrasing, and framing. They don’t think like me (of course), but they’ve learned to speak like me—because I’ve trained them through recursive feedback.

The way I see it, GPT has taken over the “wordsmith” function—the intern, the assistant, the copyeditor doing the legwork. But I’m still the one who decides what the piece is about, what its function is, what it needs to do.

GPT is the pen. I’m still the hand.

And I think this distinction matters more than ever.

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