What the Top 1% Are Doing With ChatGPT (That the Rest Aren’t Even Thinking About)
By now, we’ve all seen the usual: ChatGPT writing emails, summarizing reports, fixing grammar, maybe helping with a resume or two. It’s impressive, sure, but it's also predictable.
The truth is, most people use AI like they use Excel: functionally, safely, and unimaginatively.
But then there’s the 1%. The edge-dwellers. The quiet revolutionaries reimagining what’s possible with a language model: not just automating tasks, but augmenting identity, invention, and influence. They don’t use ChatGPT to save time. They use it to bend time.
Let’s look at what they’re doing. These are the most mind-expanding, legal, and astonishing uses I’ve found.
🧬 1. Building Simulated Personas For Insight and Power
One executive created a council of AI advisors, each trained on the writings, speeches, and philosophies of different historical figures: Marcus Aurelius, Steve Jobs, Brené Brown, and Elon Musk. He uses this AI “board” to test decisions from multiple ideological angles before presenting to real stakeholders.
“It’s like my own intellectual war room. No egos, just optimized insight.”
Another entrepreneur simulated customer archetypes based on behavioral data and had GPT run mock interviews with them to test product-market fit before spending a dime on user research.
🎭 2. Training for Power Dynamics
Elite negotiators, founders, and even lawyers are using GPT as a psychological sparring partner. They simulate:
Hostile board meetings
High-stakes legal cross-examinations
Investor pitches filled with tough, irrational objections
Salary negotiations from both sides of the table
Some even run multi-agent roleplays, where ChatGPT simultaneously represents all parties, each with its own motivation profile. Thus, you can literally rehearse politics.
👻 3. Digital Immortality Projects
One user built a “memory anchor” AI trained on decades of journal entries, family emails, social media posts, and voice transcripts, to simulate his late father’s way of thinking. It wasn’t a gimmick; it was a grief tool, a spiritual archive, and a form of continuity.
Another is building an AI mirror of themselves, feeding it reflections, opinions, and preferences daily, so that their children will someday be able to talk to it, learn from it, and evolve with it even after they’re gone.
📚 4. Reinventing How We Learn
A doctoral candidate built a custom tutor that doesn’t just answer questions, but:
Debates with you
Cross-examines your logic
Cites academic sources and counterarguments
Creates mock oral exams in the voice of tenured professors
For them, it’s not a chatbot. It’s an intellectual opponent.
In one particularly wild case, a polymath built a “Learning Spiral” agent that revisits forgotten knowledge monthly and re-teaches it in new metaphors, compounding retention and insight over time.
🛠 5. Recursive Prototyping Engines
Some startups use GPT not to build products, but to think like products. For example:
Simulating the feature roadmap of a hypothetical competitor
Generating code and customer objections in parallel
Creating documentation and training materials before the product is finalized
The wildest case? One team used GPT to architect the failure modes of their own product, then ran simulations where GPT tried to “break” the product under hundreds of edge-case scenarios.
They didn’t build a chatbot. They built an AI chaos monkey.
🧩 6. AI as a Shadow Conscience
This is the rarest, and maybe the most profound, use of all.
A few people have trained ChatGPT to act as an ethical companion, programmed with personal values, moral dilemmas, and their own internal conflicts. They use it not for answers, but for friction. For accountability. To keep promises to themselves.
Imagine an always-on mirror that gently asks:
“Is this who you said you wanted to be?”
That’s not automation. That’s something closer to transformation.
✨ Final Thought: The Gap Is Widening
If you’re using ChatGPT to write emails faster, you’re not wrong. You’re just not pushing the edge.
The real opportunity isn’t efficiency - it’s amplification of self. The ones who win this AI era won’t be the ones who outsource their work. They’ll be the ones who multiply their minds.
The only question that matters now is: What would you do if you had ten versions of yourself? The 1% already figured it out. And they’re not waiting.
#AIInnovation #ChatGPTUseCases #FutureOfWork #AIThoughtLeadership #GenerativeAI #CognitiveAugmentation #DigitalTwins #AIandEthics #AIProductivity #LinkedInAI
P.S. If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to explore the earlier pieces that inspired it.
The Gatekeepers Have Upgraded: AI vs. AI in the Battle for Human Attention
Welcome to the Pitchpocalypse: When Everyone’s Selling, No One’s Buying
The Dead Internet Theory Comes for LinkedIn: The Fall of LinkedIn’s Promise
The Future of the Human Race: When Time Becomes the Final Luxury
The AI Disruption Is Already Here, and Hiring Will Never Be the Same
From Operators to Orchestrators: Preparing Our Kids (and Ourselves) for the AI Future
The AI Red Queen Race: Why We're All Running Just to Stand Still
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2moIf I had 10 versions of myself, 2 would overthink, 2 would build startups, 1 would manage my DMs under the alias AIvan the Terrific. The others? *sigh* too many Laceys to manage.
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2moLove the insight about transformation (not just automation) - great piece.
The ‘shadow conscience’ one is something I’ve been doing for awhile. HIGHLY recommend it. Any chance you get for a model to provide feedback is helpful to have you think about your blind spots.