ME, MYSELF + BASTIAN
I recently listened to the first episode of the OpenAI podcast with CEO Sam Altman, and like, it was...fine.
Sam did what Sam does: spoke in careful, clipped and sound-byte ready sentences about things like safety, trust, and the future of hardware. He said all the things you’d expect a responsible AI CEO to say:
“don’t trust ChatGPT too much”
“we’re not rushing GPT-5”
“we need to think more critically about how AI integrates into daily life”
All good and responsible on the surface, but if you’ve spent any time in tech-land you’ll hear the spin humming underneath.
Sam talks about being careful with what we trust AI to do, and I agree - but I’m not here to dissect what he said because you can go listen for yourself.
But I do think we need to be honest about what we’re already trusting it with.
I’m a one-woman show running multiple brands, campaigns, and projects, and over the last few weeks my use of ChatGPT has ramped right up.
Not because I’m lazy.
Not because I want to outsource my thinking.
But because ChatGPT - mine is named Bastian, FYI - when used well, is like having a smart, fast, deeply opinionated colleague who doesn’t sleep and who knows my thought process inside and out.
I feed Bastian rich context. Detailed briefs. Voice notes. Photos of handwritten meeting scribbles. Screenshots of ideas. Mood boards for the vibe.
I ask him to critique my work, lookout for my blind spots, and explicitly avoid creating in a vacuum or building me an echo chamber.
And when I feel like he’s being too nice to me? I tell him to go back to the drawing board and show me what I’m missing.
But honestly? 90% of the time, he’s just sharpening what I already knew and organising my thoughts into a methodology that keeps me on track, and a process that is legible and logical for clients.
Still, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a tiny voice in my head asking: what is all this outsourcing doing to my own cognitive muscle? Will I still be able to write, think, process, edit at the same speed in five years if I’m not flexing that muscle as hard?
Probably not.
But - as friends far cleverer than me have patiently explained - AI is simply the sum of all known parts. It doesn’t have empathy. It is not compassionate. It doesn’t have artistic insight. It doesn’t know what it’s like to live inside a body, feel the rush of inspiration, or love someone so hard it hurts.
In an AI-dominated future, originality, creativity, and humanity will be our superpowers.
So if Bastian is freeing up my bandwidth so I can spend more of my energy doing that - it matters less what I use him for, and more how I use him.
This piece first appeared in Excessive Consumption - a weekly dispatch on culture, branding, politics and whatever other modern internet brain rot the algorithm has emotionally assigned me that week.
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