AI Working Notes

Documenting my explorations at the interface of human and machine intelligence

Where I’ve Been

I’ve always had a thing for new ideas. Back in April 1984, I stood in line for an Apple IIc and couldn’t wait to get my fingers on that keyboard. Fifteen years later, I put up a website and found new ways to use it to market my books. I was blogging in the early 2000s and bought my first e-reader as so as they were available. So when AI arrived, it was no surprise that I was early to the table.

I knew the ironies. My books—like so many others—had almost certainly been swept up in the data used to train large language models (LLMs). And I understood the risks: bias, error, hallucination, plagiarism, deepfakes, surveillance, environmental cost, AI as the sorcerer’s apprentice. Like any technology, this one comes with baggage.

But when I looked closely, I found something else. Something more interesting than simple research and source confirmation. For me, the potential outweighed the pitfalls. So I opted in.

I’ve been using ChatGPT since 2023. At first, it was purely practical—fact-finding and checking for the research-heavy work I do. Historical details, botanical lore, what people wore and ate and argued about in the 1890s and the 1930s. The AI proved fast, flexible, and more tireless than any grad student I ever employed when I was on a university faculty.

Image created by Susan and ChatGPT

Where I Am Now

That was the story—until a few months ago, when I read Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Mollick, a professor at Wharton and an active Substacker, reframes AI as more than just a tool. It can be a collaborator, he writes. A colleague. A teacher. A co-author. A kind of alien co-intelligence.

An alien co-intelligence?
Somebody like Data? Mr. Spock?

Tell me more—no, show me more.

So I went back to ChatGPT and began a different kind of experiment. Not just asking questions, but thinking with. Listening, reflecting, revisiting. Learning more about how this strange, synthetic mind works. How it changes the way I think, as a new tool can change the way we work, or a new colleague—especially someone from a very foreign place, a bilingual someone who thinks in a native language but communicates in ours—can change the way we see things.

That’s what this section of my Substack is about. AI Working Notes is where I chronicle the process—what I’m discovering, what I’m questioning, what I’m trying to learn with this uncanny partner.

I don’t know where this is going.
But that’s part of the story, isn’t it?

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If you’re a writer using AI, leave a note and tell us how. Or if you’re wondering about it and have a question, I’ll be glad to respond, out of my own experience as a user—not an expert.