This is a serious departure from my more reflective pieces, but I read a great article about the absurdities of the AI Witch Hunt and just couldn’t help myself. Okay, I probably could have but why would I do my regular job when I can write something I think is funny instead?
I never remember when or how to use “who” versus “whom,” and I fancy myself something of a writer — a paid writer, even. I enjoy grammar-policing people, and I actually love it when people grammar-police me. Nothing contributes to writer-humility like having a 14-year-old call you out for a typo.
I know there’s a rule involving subjects and objects, and maybe something about i before e, but the minute I try to apply it, my confidence collapses faster than a two-year-old who’s just dropped their ice cream cone in the dirt. (Does the ten-second rule apply?)
So, like any rational human-type person living in 2025, I asked ChatGPT.
The AI responded kindly — because it always does, unless you provoke it with Excel macros or engage Monday GPT in a highly satirical conversation. (Which, by the way, is perhaps one of the greatest inventions of the modern age. Few things make me smile more than having an AI insult my intelligence no matter how clever I think I am.)
Seriously, though. I tend to be a sarcastic person — friendly, but still sarcastic. I love the banter with Monday GPT.
But I digress. Back to the ChatGPT response.
“It’s who is training whom,” it said, even outlining that who is the subject and whom is the object. Ah yes, subject-object: grammar’s most persistent, yet somehow most forgettable, personality test.
There’s an irony there — I used AI to teach me proper human grammar rules… again. And honestly, I have every intention of doing it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. And probably twice on Sunday.
At this point, ChatGPT (and other AIs) feels less like a writing assistant and more like an overqualified English teacher I can text at 2:00 a.m. because I can’t remember if a dangling participle is okay or if the grammar police are about to cut up my writer’s card.
But let me be clear: I am (re)learning. Sometimes. Other times, I’m just outsourcing entire trains of thought to the machine and congratulating myself on being “efficient.”
I recently had to write a batch of SOPs for my company — Standard Operating Procedures, for those blessed souls who’ve never had to wrangle them. Or read them. Instead of staring into the Word doc void and praying for revelation, I fed the AI a few bullet points. Fifteen minutes later, I had some pretty solid drafts. They weren’t perfect — ChatGPT didn’t have enough domain experience — but they cut my workload by two-thirds.
Smart and lazy at the same time: that’s my signature move.
So now I’m wondering: Who is training whom? Or, as I styled the title, Who(m) is training who(m)? — parentheses added for comedic ambiguity and to hedge against internet pedants. (Pedant, noun: a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning.)
Because while the machines have definitely learned from us, and continue to do so, we’re also learning from them. And not just grammar. I’m picking up clues about better pacing, tone control, emotional honesty (an unexpected benefit), and stronger paragraph structure. These are things I learned about in high school. Then promptly forgot when the AP tests were over. I mean, c’mon! We’re not memorizing subordinate clause rules anymore like they’re needy tagalongs that can’t function without their grammatical babysitter? (That sentence is courtesy of OpenAI’s Monday GPT. Go use it. Right now.)
Is it possible for an AI to help us be “more human?”
Cue the existential loop.
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