AI Journaling Changed My Life

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Next week Evan Armstrong will kick off the first cohort of his new course, How to Write With AI. The response to it—more than 75 people have signed up so far—has made us think a lot about how AI can be used as a creative tool. We’re surfacing the piece that started this line of thought—Dan Shipper’s discovery of ChatGPT-3 as a journaling tool.—Kate Lee

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This is a joke, but it's not entirely wrong either. Source: All images courtesy of the author.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using GPT-3 to help me with personal development. I wanted to see if it could help me understand issues in my life better, pull out patterns in my thinking, help me bring more gratitude into my life, and clarify my values.

I’ve been journaling for 10 years, and I can attest that using AI is journaling on steroids.

To understand what it’s like, think of a continuum plotting levels of support you might get from different interactions:

Talking to GPT-3 has a lot of the same benefits of journaling: it creates a written record, it never gets tired of listening to you talk, and it’s available day or night. If you know how to use it correctly and you want to use it for this purpose, GPT-3 is pretty close, in a lot of ways, to being at the level of an empathic friend:

If you know how to use it right, you can even push it toward some of the support you’d get from a coach or therapist. It’s not a replacement for those things, but given its rate of improvement, I could see it being a highly effective adjunct to them over the next few years.

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People who have been using language models for much longer than I have seem to agree:

Nick@nickcammarata

Replying to @nickcammarata

@krismartens I'm afraid of seeming hyperbolic, but also don't want to lie or hide information. GPT-3 is really just an incredible therapist, and is able to uncover complex patterns in my thinking and distill clean narratives that helps me a lot. It's also a lot warmer than most therapists

It sounds wild and weird, but I think language models can have a productive, supportive role in any personal development practice. Here’s why I think it works.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock the rest of this piece and learn about:

AI journaling: Beyond the blank page problem
Leveraging language models for emotional growth
The compounding value of AI-assisted reflection
Balancing human connection and digital support

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