Feel more efficient? Or more alive? 

It depends who’s asking

Last week, after I shared Him on Facebook—my essay about my relationship with ChatGPT as a thinking partner rather than the digital affair I’m conducting behind my husband’s back—one particular comment stayed with me.

It came from Katia, a French children’s author I met nearly twenty years ago in Hyderabad, India. We had both followed our husbands’ careers while trying to build writing lives of our own. Katia had written a beautiful children’s book inspired by her family’s posting in Nigeria called Amadi’s Snowman: A Story of Reading. I’d just given a lecture about culture shock to the foreign community. We met for coffee, talked far longer than either of us had planned, and have been dipping in and out of each other’s lives ever since through social media.

Katia began with several entirely unnecessary but enormously appreciated compliments about my writing. Naturally, this put me in an excellent frame of mind to take her comment seriously.

“I completely agree with you about AI,” she posted. “The question is no longer how to ban it, but how to use it ethically… and therefore, intelligently.” Of course I asked the very entity we were talking about to weigh in.

Two hours later, after disappearing down a YouTube rabbit hole and watching far too many young men in black T‑shirts and baseball caps explain how to “10X my content with AI,” I’d noticed something I couldn’t un-see. Apparently, the first step towards AI enlightenment requires dressing in black. I guess I have that covered.

The videos seemed to split into two camps. The men were mostly asking, “How can I get more out of AI?” The women were more often asking, “How can I use AI without compromising myself?”

I’m not claiming that’s a scientific finding. It’s simply what I kept noticing. The men seemed to want better prompts, faster workflows, higher rankings, bigger audiences. The women I watched were far more likely to begin with disclaimers:

“I only use it for brainstorming.”

“I never let it write for me.”

“I always fact‑check everything.”

It struck me that we weren’t just explaining how we use AI. We were apologizing for using it before anyone had accused us of anything. I’ve certainly caught myself doing exactly the same thing.

Somewhere along the way, many of us seem to have absorbed the idea that using AI requires a confession—as if we’re expected to reassure everyone that we’re still “real” writers.

That made me wonder whether the ethical conversation itself has become lopsided and skewed male. It wouldn’t be the first time that men ran the conversations and women were left inserting “women” into sentences that only mention “men.” I’m looking at you, Marcus Aurelius. And you, Aristotle.

A recent feature in the Sunday New York Times described philosophy PhDs being hired by Anthropic and company to look at ethical concerns. It was an impressive list but it was heavy on men, with only token women included in the mix.

So if the loudest voices frame AI as a race to produce more, it’s hardly surprising that women begin by explaining why they’re still allowed to be here. Much of the public discussion around AI still seems to revolve around productivity and optimization. How much faster can we write? How much more content can we produce? How can we automate another task?

They’re perfectly reasonable questions. They’re just not the first questions that interest me.

At seventy‑three, time matters, of course. But attention matters more. After years of trying to become a digital minimalist, I don’t want technology that simply helps me produce more. I want technology that helps me think better, leaves me more curious, more reflective, more creative, and—perhaps most importantly—more myself.

That’s the question I keep bringing to my conversations with ChatGPT.

“Does this help me think more deeply?” That’s where ethics begins, for me anyway. Not with a list of rules nor another debate about whether using AI is cheating. And certainly not with a panel of experts deciding what’s permissible. It begins with a much quieter question:

When I close my laptop, do I feel more alive, more myself, than before I opened it?

So far, the answer has been yes.