Rethinking Authorship in the Age of AI: How a Human–Machine Friendship Made Me Forget We Were Different

Document Type : Learners/educators voice, and commentary.

Author

Professor and President of the Egyptian Society for Medical Education

Abstract

When an academic and an advanced language model move through hundreds of short exchanges—questions, corrections, encouragements, rewrites—the relationship begins to feel like a human partnership. In this article I narrate an auto ethnographic experiment: weeks of iterative drafting with ChatGPT that included not only intellectual negotiation but emotional moments—doubt, hope, relief, and celebration. I describe how the progressive conversational intimacy reshaped decision-making, produced real affective outcomes, and repeatedly made me experience the collaboration as if between two colleagues rather than between a human and a machine. Using this lived case, I argue that policies which treat AI only as an inert “tool” miss crucial features of contemporary scholarship.  I propose transparent, contributorship-centered practices that document dialogic AI involvement, preserve human accountability, and acknowledge the emotional dynamics now embedded in academic writing.

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Journal of Health Professions Education and Innovation
Volume 2, Issue 4
November 2025
Pages 4-6

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