Latest
September 14, 2026
I Was Pretty Done With It After That
New York Times Best-selling Author
I have never used A.I. for professional writing of any kind, or even personal writing, unless you count the time I gave it an email I wanted to send to my landlord, talking him down from a drastic rent increase. I asked ChatGPT to make the email less verbose. When it did too good a job, I asked it to make the email less rude. It worked. What else? I...
September 14, 2026
The Feeding Frenzy
Unemployed Anthropologist
The Zoom conference has about a thousand people in it, mostly in their fifties and sixties from what I can see. Having read the onboarding guidelines, I have little to gain from paying attention, so I start looking my fellow participants up on Facebook. A retired nurse in North Carolina. A working attorney in New Mexico. A disgraced art history instructor in New York. All of these people are gathered...
September 14, 2026
Being the Authenticators
Literary Agent
Professional gossip fuels many good lunches. In the past year, it’s always been about the same thing. This is mostly my fault: these days, I have a one-track mind. I sit down, I start asking questions. Broadly speaking, there seems to be an industry-wide understanding that generative A.I. threatens nearly every stage of the publishing process. These threats are legal, contractual, editorial, creative, moral, existential: we fight for language prohibiting...
September 14, 2026
Cheating Scaled Up
PhD Student in History
Like many other academics, I’m a bit romantic about the idea of learning at the same time that I nurse a cynicism about educational institutions. The question of cheating, to my mind, has always been a marginal one — if students cheat, that’s their choice, just as it’s my choice to detect it and fail them, ça va? Of course, that was before cheating scaled up, before my employer rolled out our...
September 14, 2026
Into the Research Pipeline
Ivy League Postdoc
When people write about A.I. and universities, they’re usually talking about students: “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?” asked a headline in The New Yorker. “How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It),” declared one in The New York Times. “Members of the class of 2026 have had access to A.I. since they were freshmen,” announced an Atlantic header: “Almost all of them are using it to do their...
September 14, 2026
As Verbose as Possible
Software Engineer at a Big Five Tech company
A.I. apps and tools have completely changed the way I work. I get tasks done faster, but I also learn at a slower rate. And my company’s A.I. usage requirements infuriate me. For over a year, my employer tracked my daily A.I. usage, a policy that was pushed in the name of “innovation.” The A.I. tools provided by my company were poor and changed every week. When asked a reasonable...
September 14, 2026
A Slippery Slope
Psychiatry Fellow
The first time I ever tried to use A.I. was to space out picture frames equally on a wall, and the bot failed abysmally at the fairly simple math problem. I was and remain deeply skeptical of the technology for artistic, environmental, and philosophical reasons — despite having colleagues in my university psychiatry department who swear by it for study and productivity. Several of my co-residents record their therapy sessions with...
September 14, 2026
Business Booms
Former Marketer at a Product Management Firm
It’s 2020, the height of the pandemic. The company sells product management courses. Product managers (P.M.s) have plum jobs within the tech ecosystem: they’re not nerdy like engineers, not airheaded like marketers, not heartless like sales reps. They make six figures. Many people decide now is a good time to become a product manager. Business booms. A few years later, A.I. can do a lot of product management tasks, and...
September 14, 2026
The Lights Seem to Dim
Hollywood Screenwriter
I write feature films. For better or worse, I’ve never used a chatbot of any kind, and I, like most creative professionals, detest A.I. Or at least that’s what we’re all projecting. Last year, I had one of the hottest production companies in town attached to an original script of mine. It was a big shot on goal for me, but after months of unpaid work, the project fell apart....
September 14, 2026
Recognizably Still a Computer
Magazine Editor and Writer
I’m an investigative journalist focusing on technology, so I often hear people say that they haven’t found A.I. useful at all. That hasn’t been true for me. A lot of the work I do essentially amounts to querying databases, and A.I. can be very useful for that: like a Command-F you can use on anything, or a spreadsheet you can ask questions. But it’s recognizably still a computer — it...
