I had to go deep into AI to understand what it was doing to me.

AI expanded my thinking, but sometimes did too much of it for me.

I’m still exploring where my thinking ends and the machine begins.

I began writing professionally in 1985, something that feels like a lifetime ago. I was a young copywriter, and the pencil was still very much a tool of my trade. The Macintosh was new, and so was I. In a curious way, we grew up together, and I don't think that's inconsequential.

I watched the tools of writing change around me. Pencil and paper gave way to point and click, and eventually the internet and search became integral to the mechanics of writing. I embraced most of those changes But the basic relationship remained rather mechanical and the graphical user interface was a tool to write something. That's what I thought.

But Large language models changed that relationship, almost overnight. Here was a technology that could work directly with an unfinished idea and do something with it. I could offer the machine a bit of a thought and get something back that might actually move the thought forward.

I jumped in head first, not realizing that my head (brain) was at the heart (soul) of this transformation.

I used LLMs a lot. From the exploration of ideas to a timely debate, I found something that I'd never experienced before. And I wasn't particularly interested in defending the ownership boundaries around writing. More importantly, I wanted to understand what happened when AI entered the process, with me, for me, and at times, without me.

Knowledge Answers Back

Let me be........

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