Journaling in the AI Era

Readers may think of diaries or journals as written by adolescent girls who vomit out feelings onto blank sheets. But the act is itself tension-relieving. Looking at those written words days or weeks later can provide cognitive perspective that was impossible to obtain at the time.

Personal journals are not, however, limited to adolescent girls. These are just a few of the famous personalities who kept diaries: John Quincy Adams, Marie Curie, Bob Dylan, Harry Truman, and Ronald Reagan.

Diaries as Stress-Release Mechanisms

Spera et al. (1994) conducted a research project involving 63 high-technology employees who were laid off on the same day. Twenty-one wrote a diary every day with their deepest feelings, while 21 kept a daily spreadsheet calendar with no expression of feelings. And 21 participants did nothing.

Three months later, 68 percent of participants who wrote diaries found jobs, while only 48 percent of participants who used spreadsheets and 27 percent of participants in the control group managed to find employment.

There was no significant difference between the three groups in terms of networking meetings, phone calls, or letters sent. The authors suggested that conducting a job search is stressful, and that the inhibition of stressful feelings creates stress about stress, and this meta-stress inhibits success (Spera et al., 1994).

Risk Management in Journal Writing

While writing a daily journal can be beneficial, the location of your written material is an important risk management issue. For example, Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, began writing a diary and saved the files in his business laptop. Former OpenAI investor Elon Musk launched a lawsuit against OpenAI, and Brockman’s laptop was subpoenaed for evidence.

An entry from Brockman’s diary became Exhibit 161 in a public trial. The Wall Street Journal made some of the personal contents public (Cohen, 2026). The combination of computer power and artificial intelligence allowed Musk’s lawyers to comb through the information, finding a key revealing entry.

Former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci is another prominent journal keeper. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Fauci served as a lead member of the Coronavirus Task Force. He later served as President Biden’s chief medical officer. Fauci wrote more than 1,100 pages in his journal, which was kept on his workplace computer.

Years after he left federal employment, copies of his files remained within the NIH and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The IT department downloaded Fauci’s files and gave them to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who passed the files to U.S. Senator Rand Paul, a long-time adversary of Fauci. The details of his diary have since been leaked to the press (Stolberg, 2026).

Old-Fashioned Becomes State-of-the-Art

In an AI world, the least risky thing may be to write your diary into a basic composition notebook, available anywhere for a couple of dollars. Keep the notebook in a secure location at home. In addition to the added security, slowing down to deliberately write your thoughts can be emotionally useful.

If You Must Write Your Journal on a Computer, it's best to use a personal computer or laptop that is not connected to your employer. We recommend storing your personal files in a personal cloud account with a company like Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon which spends the money to make it difficult for hackers to break in.

Summary and Conclusions

Vomiting out your stress onto a sheet of paper or a computer screen can be healthy, yet in an emerging AI world, anything digital risks being read by others.

We believe in the psychological value of writing journals. And we believe in the importance of risk management.