In this solo episode of the Million Dollar Grit podcast, host Julie Chenell, a writer and entrepreneur, vents her frustration about the rapid rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and their threat to writers and many knowledge‑based professions. She argues that if humanity stops writing, we risk a cultural and intellectual decline, drawing parallels to historical losses such as the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Julie outlines four psychological benefits of writing—clarifying thought, fostering gratitude, closing mental loops, and boosting creativity—asserting that these benefits are essential for personal and societal health. She also raises a concern that large language models may degrade over time as they train on increasingly noisy human‑generated content. To illustrate the real‑world stakes, she recounts a case where an author’s name was hijacked by AI‑generated books on Amazon and Goodreads, highlighting the difficulty of protecting one’s voice. Despite using AI as a tool, Julie pledges to continue writing by hand as an act of rebellion, framing it as a moral imperative for mental, spiritual, and intellectual well‑being. The episode ends with a motivational call to embrace grit and keep writing.
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Hey everyone, this is Julie, and today I am coming to you as a writer pissed that AI is threatening so many people's livelihoods. Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there. Before I jump in, I just want to say I consider myself pretty tech savvy, innovative. I bought Bitcoin back in whatever, 2015, before it was cool and trendy. So I am happy to be on the cutting edge of new innovation, and I really am not a stick in the mud. But when ChatGPT came out at the beginning of the year and Let's be honest, AI has been hanging around the business world and our tech world for quite a long time in lots of different ways. Social media, essentially the algorithm is AI, but this was a new, this was like a new level when, when ChatGPT came out and everybody quickly realized, oh my gosh, this changes the game. And writers especially, and even if you don't identify as a writer, but you are an online business owner, writing is one of the The most frequent activities you do. There was this, oh my gosh, moment where, you know, people were predicting that within 1 to 2 years, writers would, would, would disappear because these language learning models would be able to replicate them. And then people started to realize, oh, what about lawyers? And what about, you know, bookkeepers and accountants and just like all of these fields. And there was just this big, Blah, you know, freak out moment. And some of us who regularly write and maybe don't enjoy writing, we were excited, right? Because we didn't have to work as hard. And I use ChatGPT fairly regularly for various things. It helps me sort out ideas. This very podcast, I used ChatGPT. So this episode isn't really me sort of bagging on artificial intelligence, but I am angry because I'm worried for the state of humanity. And I would like to make a very strong, unfounded, non-scientific hypothesis that says that if we as humans stop writing, our civilization will fail. And maybe civilization would be lost. I don't know. But I think that the actual act of writing is so important to our emotional health, to our intellectual health, to the sharing of ideas, that I'm worried what happens to humans if we stop writing. And again, I'm not a historian, but I do like to read about history, and I know that we've been writing for a very long time, and that when we first learned how to communicate with words, our entire civilization changed. And, you know, you don't have to be a historian to know that when, you know, the great Roman Empire finally fell and the burning of the Library at Alexandria, we— our entire civilization went into a Dark Ages that lasted for like I don't know, what, 700 years or something ridiculous? Like, we were set back. And of course, you know, there were, there were monks and people that had saved some of that knowledge. And we don't have the, you know, it's not like today with the technology. But basically, the, the loss of ideas and writings set humanity back hundreds and hundreds of years. And so if you look now We have been, you know, in the information age. Information is just here. It's available. It's at your fingertips. And we've really advanced our civilization exponentially as that has happened. And here comes AI. And what happens if a whole large segment of the pop stops writing and lets AI do the writing? For us. And so I thought I would talk about like some of the psychological benefits of writing and explain that even if you are using ChatGPT in your business or you are a writer, it is a great act of rebellion against, against AI to continue to write even though we have these tools. Because of all the benefits. And I don't know if you've ever had a situation in your business where you have felt lost or confused, but writing unbelievably clarifies ideas. Okay, so when you have to write something down, that's actually the first, like, act of learning. Think about it in school when you were listening to your teacher and you were— what were you doing? You were taking notes. So if you're trying to learn something for your business, or you're trying to teach a team member, the actual, like, kinesthetic act of writing something down helps you learn it differently than if you're just hearing it or reading it. So if you're listening to this podcast and you decide to take notes on what I said, you're going to understand it more deeply than someone who just listened to it. So writing helps clarify you know, how you think, especially if, if what you're feeling inside is really, uh, jumbled up, then writing will create that clarity. So if we stop doing this, we lose our clarity of thought, right? The second thing is writing is an act of gratitude. And when you journal or catalog, like if you go away on a trip or you write a note to a team member, you know, really grateful for how they've helped you or something like that. Like, it reminds you of the good things you have. And when people stop being grateful, really bad things start to happen. We all need to work on our gratitude. Another thing that writing can do is it can help you, like, close loops, if you will. So for those of you who have a lot of ideas in your business, and you're constantly thinking of ways to, you know, expand your revenue or optimize your systems, writing is going to be a way to kind of close those loops so those ideas don't spin in the background. And if you ever had a computer with the fan that like runs and gets really hot, it's because there's like a million things running in the background. So if you have that kind of analogy in your head, when you have these ideas and these thoughts in the back of your head, it's taking up mental bandwidth and it's making you less productive. And so writing them down and getting them out actually closes, um, those tabs. So another thing is that creative Like, uh, writing makes you more creative. Like, creative writing is actually an art form. And what happens if we stop writing creatively and we just let the language learning models, you know, learn on what we've already done to date and we stop producing? This is really funny, and I can't, I can't remember where I read it, and I can't remember if it's if that's a legit source, but I tend to read legit sources, so take this with a grain of salt. But I read that ChatGPT-4, I believe it is, is actually gotten a little bit stupider over the past few months. And that's because, you know, the theory, of course, and what everyone's worried about with AI is that so far AI has been trained on actual human data, right? It's been using the internet, social media, it's been learning on the collective sort of conscious. But over time, what they're thinking is AI is going to produce the content and then it's going to learn on its own content. And it seems like they're— it seems like it's the same problem that you'd have if you started to do inbreeding of like animals, like It doesn't seem like such a good idea, but I'm not the smartest person in the room, so what do I know? But they were saying that ChatGPT actually was getting less intelligent because of how many humans were feeding it bad information, just either because they were doing it for nefarious reasons or they were just, you know, like the kid who doesn't play with the toy the right way. They like take it apart and they want to like trick the AI. They want to see if the AI can to, you know, figure out what's a joke and what's not. And so that's not great. That's not a great realization that the LLM that's running ChatGPT-4 was actually getting dumber engaging with us. But again, if we just kind of step back for a second, if you are a writer and you've been sort of pissed that AI is, is coming in and taking over a lot of these skills that we have, you know, used for thousands of years, I'm gonna say that in order to save civilization, we should all, in an act of rebellion, continue writing. Another thing that is sort of coming to the surface with AI, and I told you this podcast was gonna be kind of unfiltered and doesn't have a clear ending here. This is just more of a, this is what's in my mind about AI. One of my good friends and clients alerted me to a woman, an author who I guess some spammer wrote some books using AI, attached her name to it, uploaded them to Amazon and started selling them under her name. And Goodreads, which is Goodreads is sort of a profile for authors. It pulls in books based on the author's name. So her actual Goodreads profile was showing that she had written these books and she couldn't get Goodreads or Amazon to take it down. And they said because her name, her actual author name wasn't trademarked, she didn't have the authority to like get these books removed. And so That's a whole nother podcast, another episode about what happens when AI starts taking your words, taking your voice, taking your video, and just how hard it's going to be to be able to tell what's real from what's, you know, synthetically generated. And so I am committing here on this podcast that I'm going to continue to write with my own pen, with my own hand, with my own brain. That doesn't mean I won't use ChatGPT. It doesn't mean that I won't look for shortcuts in the AI world. But I think for my mental health, for my spiritual health, for my intellectual health, for my brain health, and for everybody's brain health, we all have a moral imperative to keep riding. So that's my rant for the day. I hope you have a great day and I'll talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks. Another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.
