Writer. Speaker. Creator of the Socratic approach to AI.
Jay Dixit is a writer, speaker, and educator, and the creator of the Socratic approach to AI: a framework for using AI as a thinking partner that draws out human creativity rather than replacing it.
For writers, educators, and thinkers who refuse to outsource their thinking to a machine.
Jay Dixit · New York City
The New York TimesRolling StonePsychology TodayWiredTaught writing at YaleOpenAI’s first Head of Community for WritersWinner of The Moth
About me.
I went back to school and got my MFA in creative nonfiction. I started teaching writing at Yale (a senior seminar of my own creation called The Art of Storytelling). And I worked at OpenAI as Head of Community for Writers, steering writers, students, and educators away from using AI to generate slop and toward using it to elicit their OWN creativity.
At OpenAI, I championed the idea that ChatGPT should actively ask users questions, not just generate answers — a concept I called Socratic questioning. That idea, and the word “Socratic,” helped inspire some aspects of ChatGPT Study Mode.
Socratic AI
A tool for thinking, not a substitute for it.
I founded Socratic AI to show people there’s another way to use AI: not as a content generator and work-doer-for-youer, but as a thinking partner that pushes us to aim higher and do our best work.
Using AI to support, inspire, and elicit human creativity — without ever outsourcing the writing, the ideas, or the thinking to the machine.
My litmus test for whether your use of AI is Socratic: Does using AI get more of yourself on the page, or less?
What this looks like
AI asks questions that surface your ideas and stories.
AI acts as a first reader, giving feedback on work you wrote.
AI helps you set milestones and finish projects without doing the creative work for you.
My PopTech 2025 talk in Washington, DC, on getting AI to ask you questions instead of answering them. Followed by a Q&A with behavioral economist Dan Ariely about the value of productive struggle.
“By far the best presentation I’ve seen on how to actually use this stuff.”
My own writing on Substack: my ideas, techniques, examples, and field notes about a better way to use AI — not as a content generator, but as a thinking partner to push you to aim higher and do your best creative work.
In my Socratic AI Intensive, you get six weeks to put this approach to work on your own project with the support you need to get it done: me coaching you in real time, a cohort of serious fellow writers keeping you accountable, and a complete system built around one goal: finally finishing your writing project.
“I had been stuck for years. Unable to write. I’d published nonfiction books under contract, so you’d think I could manage it — but when it came to my own writing, sitting down felt all but impossible. Now I get right to work. I’m at my desk on time. Every day. I have more than 30 rough chapters now.”
Cherryl C. · AI for Writers
“Jay’s process does not allow generative writing. These are all my own words.”
If you’re interested in my storytelling workshops:
Participants learn the GHOST Method™ — my easy, step-by-step framework for telling stories that captivate attention, spark curiosity, and take listeners on an emotional journey, priming them to remember, tell others, and take action.
Workshop clients include Amazon / IMDb, LG, LinkedIn, Redfin, and Citibank.
