The First Day I Opened ChatGPT
Thinking Out Loud About AI - Part 2
On June 27, 2024, I opened ChatGPT and asked it to write a blog post.
It was late afternoon and I was sitting in my quiet co-working space. I had too many browser tabs open and not enough mental bandwidth to close any of them. (Let’s be honest - I never close them... ) The prompt I typed was generic on purpose. I wanted to see what would happen if I handed a machine a topic and waited. It returned something competent, polished, vaguely impressive in the way a well-written canned blog post can read. I read it once and closed the tab.
I didn’t publish it. I wasn’t planning to publish it.
At the time, I didn’t consider myself someone who would ever write with AI. I’m a music therapist. I run a business that’s twenty years old. I sit on executive boards and committees - for our local community theatre, for my Methodist church, for a racial equity trustee role with the city of Jackson, for a collaborative focused on positive outcomes for children and families. I’m a mom of three amazing children. I’m a wife. A performer. An elder millennial who remembers life before smartphones and has college photos printed and tucked into scrapbooks.
I haven’t ever identified as a writer.
I love to think out loud. I love to brain dump. I love to talk something through in real time until the shape of it reveals itself. I trust my gut with an almost irrational loyalty these days. It has steered me well. When I override it, I usually regret it.
For most of my career, writing has been sporadic. I would brainstorm the vision and hand off the communication. I have always been the idea person - the one who sees where something could go before the logistics are clear. Also in 2024, someone handed me Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark Winters, a book about business visionaries and integrators. I read it and felt understood in a way that was both clarifying and mildly inconvenient. I am wired as a visionary. My ideas multiply faster than my systems.
That June afternoon didn’t feel significant at the time. It was curiosity. A test. Another technology entering the room.
I grew up alongside the internet. I loved AIM (I had the best song lyric away messages) and Napster. I remember the music industry panic and the ethical debates about digital downloads - especially free ones. And let’s not get into the computer viruses that came with those downloads… As a musician, it was complicated to watch something you loved become controversial because of the way it moved through technology. Every generation seems to get at least one tool that feels destabilizing. Imagine being the younger generations now - the one tool is exponentially destabilizing.
AI is that tool now.
In the months after that first tab closed, something subtle began to shift. I started noticing how quickly I could get ideas out when I wasn’t worried about polishing them mid-thought. I stopped hitting backspace. I let typos stay. I let sentences run long and messy. The editing, the smoothing, the refining - all of that has historically slowed my thinking down. It interrupts the current between intuition and expression.
And for the first time in my professional life, people began reading what I put out.
Not just skimming. Reading. Responding. Telling me that the words felt like something they had been thinking but hadn’t yet articulated. That surprised me. I’ve been speaking in rooms for years. I’ve built programs, hosted concerts, facilitated therapy sessions, led board meetings. Writing was never the primary channel.
Something was different.
Now, I’ve found myself listening to more conversations about AI - founders, technologists, writers debating what this means for creativity. There is tension in those discussions. Hesitation. A subtle choreography around disclosure. People are navigating how honest to be about their processes.
I haven’t said much publicly about mine yet.
What I know is this: I feel more internally regulated and outwardly expressed right now than I have in my life. My ideas are landing outside my head with a clarity that used to require an integrator, a communications director, or an unreasonable amount of late-night energy.
I’m still thinking about what that means.
