Computer, Enhance: An Interview with Lex Founder Nathan Baschez

Over the past few years, I’ve been reading and learning how people have incorporated AI—especially generative AI—into their lives. The list is fascinating, and even if you don’t think so, you have to admit it’s at least wide-ranging: the recipe for tonight’s dinner, a confident email asking for a pay raise, an AI boyfriend (and in this scenario, you also have a human husband).

When ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, it reached 100 million users in two months, making it the fastest-growing app in history. Practically overnight, it redefined expectations for AI, setting off an arms race among tech giants, fueling billion-dollar investments, and reshaping entire industries.

Governments scrambled to respond (they still are). Italy outright banned ChatGPT—later lifting the restriction—while the Biden White House issued an Executive Order on AI safety. (The latest Executive Order on AI, from the Trump White House, calls to establish “the commitment of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s dominance in AI.”) AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, CodeWhisperer, and ChatGPT automated repetitive coding tasks, allowing companies to hire fewer entry-level developers or reallocate resources. AI-generated art even won first place in a Colorado State Fair competition. 

The near-future consequences of large-scale, ever-improving AI systems feel all too real—especially when a chatbot can lay them out so eloquently for you, with timestamps, before asking: “Would you like me to help you further plan out your demise?”

In 2022, a friend came over—a friend who operates his life mainly through his phone and doesn’t care about computers. Showing him something in this realm would hardly get a reaction. But I just had to show him something I had stumbled across: Lex, a word processor like Docs or Word, but with a key difference: "+++."

“+++” was shorthand in Lex to predictively continue your writing, offering a glimpse of where it might go next. I had just learned how to format a TV script, so I wrote a few lines, and Lex and I went back and forth, generating scene after scene of walking into the woods at night. Even for a casual (sorry, big dog), he was stunned.

It felt like unlocking a door, a fog lifting around us, the horizon of the future visible for the first time—until it didn’t. AI's responses became predictable, more like a party trick than a creative breakthrough, falling into loops, churning out variations of the same tropes. 

AI’s failures weren’t just personal. In 2023, Google’s Bard AI wiped $100 billion from its market value overnight after confidently sharing a factually incorrect answer. Bing’s chatbot spiraled into existential crises, gaslit users, and even fell in love. In January, Meta pulled its AI character accounts after they repeatedly generated racist and offensive remarks.

Ethical, geopolitical, and philosophical debates around AI continue daily, with some arguing they could slow its progress—but so far, its momentum remains unchecked. Benchmark scores in reasoning, coding, and language comprehension have surged. Models like GPT-4 have achieved 40% higher factual accuracy, 2×–5× faster processing speeds, and a 3× reduction in cost, bringing accessibility and scale along with it. Beyond text, AI can now see, hear, and speak, reshaping how we create and problem-solve. But for me, its most profound—and most personal—impact has been on writing.

Nowhere has the backlash against AI been louder than in writing circles, where it has been seen as not only a threat but an affront to the craft. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike in 2023 put AI-generated scripts at the center of its demands, with writers fearing studios would replace them with AI trained on their own work. Bestselling authors, including George R.R. Martin and John Grisham, sued OpenAI, alleging their books were scraped without consent.

While some writers see AI as a tool—useful for brainstorming, structuring, or drafting—others believe it dilutes creativity, reducing storytelling to pattern recognition, stripped of human intent. If storytelling can be outsourced, if AI can mimic voice without understanding, what does that mean for human expression? For those who have spent lifetimes mastering the craft, AI’s rise feels like watching a ghostwriter with infinite speed, infinite memory, and—unlike a human ghostwriter—no understanding of what it truly means to write.

These tensions—between efficiency and artistry, augmentation and replacement, creativity and computation—are no longer theoretical. They are playing out in real time, particularly in how writers engage with AI. Some reject it outright. Others experiment with its possibilities, using it as a collaborator rather than a competitor. But no one, it seems, can ignore it. Lex, which now has 300,000 users, represents one of the more tangible shifts—carving out a modest yet substantial dent in the word processor monopoly.

What does this all mean for the future of writing?

To explore this, I spoke with Lex’s founder, Nathan Baschez, about how AI-assisted writing has evolved, whether it’s an enhancement or erosion of creativity, and if the fears around AI’s role in storytelling are justified—or just the latest chapter in the long history of technology disrupting the written word.

Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

When you were initially building Lex, was AI always a part of it? Or was that something that came later?

Nathan: I started Lex as a side project. AI was something I was curious about, but it wasn’t central at first. It was more like, Maybe there’s a cool role AI could play—how would that work? I didn’t start out thinking, I want to build an AI writing product.

I got a basic, usable writing tool working with simple AI integration. At the time, AI APIs—like GPT-3—were all about autocomplete. The main AI feature in Lex was built around the question: What’s a version of autocomplete that’s actually useful for the creative process?

Instead of throwing out something generic—like, Thanks!—I wanted it to be more substantial but only there when needed. It wasn’t about AI taking over writing but generating ideas when you’re stuck, giving you something to react to.

It’s funny, because that feature isn’t even our most popular one anymore. There are way cooler ways to use AI in writing now. But the original idea—that AI can be a source of ideas, high-level feedback, and even line-level suggestions—still holds.

What has been the biggest change or shift for you, from how you thought people might use Lex to how they are actually using it now?