by Teresa Swartz Roberts
Blog post 67 Copyright 2026
I am a cyborg. I have a metal probe in my brain and a battery in my chest. Therefore, I meet the definition of cyborg: a creature with both biological and mechanical parts. It’s both cool and terrifying.
Meanwhile, I have avoided the technological revolution that’s going on surrounding AI– artificial intelligence. Until now. Today is my first experience with writing using AI. So far, I am using it only for proofreading, and only because my hands don’t have the dexterity to tap the right letters so much of the time. I have to make corrections in voice-to-text, mistakes that originated with voice-to-text. In other words, I speak a sentence into the AI. It interprets the sentence differently than I said it. I start to type corrections and mess those up. The AI fixes my mistakes. It’s a machine-made problem with a machine-made solution.
I say that I have not used AI to write, but I have used it to research. My usual questions are entertainment based. “In Ted Lasso’s 3rd season, what is the title of the poem the character Mae recites over the pinball machine?” It takes me a minute to get all of those parameters typed in, so I speak them. And AI is a lot faster than I can do the calculation of the variables. A poem? Mae? A pinball machine? (The answer is “This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin.)
Curious about how the AI would define feeling, I asked it, “What does it feel like to have Parkinson’s Disease?” My answer came from a surprising place: my own blog. This blog—the one you are reading—Life through the Lens of Parkinson’s.
I was so surprised that I didn’t place a bookmark or take a screenshot to prove my blog was being consulted when I tell this story or even to remember how the AI answered my question. When I asked the question again, I got an answer that was based on the National Institutes of Health. But I can tell you the words that were attributed to my blog were true, helpful, and made me a little proud.
They also made me feel a little creeped out. It wasn’t that the words had been used improperly. Anybody can cite my blog as long as they follow the rules of copyright and plagiarism. The problem was that it was done by a machine. I guess I have a bias against machines writing on human subjects. I don’t know how much leeway to give them. To err is human. But I don’t know what it’s called when a machine gets it wrong. And machines have gotten it wrong plenty of times. Case in point: My prescriptions have often been incorrectly priced because a computer made a bad decision about what was covered by insurance and what was not, and then the wrong decision was made again and again based on precedent.
I am not the first person to become frustrated enough with the computerized phone tree to the point of screaming “REPRESENTATIVE” into the phone. I did a double take when I was talking to a nonhuman, and when I said, “You are not even a real person,” it responded. “Yes, I am a real person.”
I said earlier that this was my first foray into using AI to write, but I’m sure that’s not correct. AI is in everything I do these days. It makes me wonder if it means anything that the tablet I am using suddenly stopped working while I was writing this blog.
Back to my being a cyborg, I am grateful for the technology but frustrated with the slow speed at which I’m getting my miracle. I want my miracle now! I have been in to my neurologist’s office for one programming session with the doctor and the technician from the company that makes my deep brain stimulator. I have had mixed results that aren’t terribly observable at this time. Stay tuned and I’ll give you more details in my next installment, which I hope will not be entitled “Rise of the Machine.”
