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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

An Unusual Senior
in the Age of AI

How ChatGPT Has Become Part of the Integral World Project

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

A Small Minority in a Rapidly Changing User Population

OpenAI recently published a fascinating overview of how people use ChatGPT, broken down by age, subject matter, and the kind of activity they engage in. The figures offer an interesting perspective on my own work. I belong to the 65-and-over age group, a relatively small segment of ChatGPT's user population. In OpenAI's September 2026 data, this group accounted for approximately 2.7% of the sampled messages.

There is an important qualification: this is the share of messages, not a direct count of individual users. The age analysis is based on people who have self-reported their age on the platform. Nevertheless, it gives us a useful indication of how comparatively unusual sustained ChatGPT use among older adults remains.

But there is a second distinction that makes my case more unusual. I do not primarily use ChatGPT to ask occasional questions, obtain practical advice, summarize documents, or polish emails. I use it as an active participant in the production of essays for Integral World. This is a rather different application of artificial intelligence: not simply consulting a chatbot, but incorporating it into an ongoing intellectual and editorial project.

What the Age Statistics Tell Us

The OpenAI Signals data show that the share of messages generated by older age groups has increased considerably since 2024. The 65+ category has tripled its share, from 0.9% in July 2024 to 2.7% in September 2026. The younger groups still account for the great majority of messages, but the audience is becoming more evenly distributed across generations.

The following table summarizes the age distribution of sampled messages.

The trend is clear. The youngest group's share has declined, while every older group has gained ground. The 65+ category has grown threefold in just over two years. It is still a small minority, but no longer quite the statistical afterthought it was in 2024.

The figures do not tell us how many older people use ChatGPT to write substantial essays. They do not even distinguish between someone asking for a short paragraph and someone developing a sustained intellectual argument. That distinction is precisely where my own experience becomes relevant.

What Older Users Actually Do with ChatGPT

OpenAI also breaks down the topics discussed by different age groups. The 65+ group uses ChatGPT for a relatively broad range of purposes. Practical guidance and information seeking are prominent, while writing accounts for a smaller proportion of messages than it does among younger users.

Writing, at 16.6%, is a substantial activity, but it is not the dominant one. Moreover, the category is broad. It can include drafting, editing, rewriting, and other forms of writing assistance. It does not tell us how many people use ChatGPT to produce complete essays, develop arguments, conduct sustained criticism, or maintain an online intellectual publication.

That is the gap between the available statistics and my particular use of the technology.

From Asking Questions to Producing Essays

For many users, ChatGPT is essentially an information service. They ask a question and receive an answer. Others use it as a practical assistant: to write a letter, summarize a report, prepare a lesson, or solve a technical problem.

My use is more ambitious. Over the past three years, ChatGPT has helped me produce well over a thousand essays for Integral World. These include critical examinations of Ken Wilber's work, reviews of books, discussions of evolutionary theory, analyses of contemporary integral thinkers, and essays on politics, science, religion, and philosophy.

The difference is not merely quantitative. It concerns the role that ChatGPT plays in the writing process. It can help formulate an argument, reconstruct an author's position, identify weaknesses in a theory, compare competing explanations, suggest counterarguments, and turn a collection of ideas into a coherent essay. It can also help with appendices, tables, titles, and the occasional satirical treatment of an especially extravagant claim.

In other words, I am not simply asking ChatGPT to write something for me. I am using it as a research and editorial partner in a continuing intellectual enterprise.

Integral World as a Testing Ground

Integral World provides a particularly interesting environment for this collaboration. Its subject matter is intellectually demanding and often contentious. Ken Wilber's integral philosophy, evolutionary spirituality, post-Wilber developments, and the claims of contemporary spiritual and metaphysical thinkers all invite critical examination.

These subjects are not easily handled by superficial summaries. They require familiarity with arguments developed over decades, an ability to distinguish an author's actual position from a convenient caricature, and a willingness to examine claims against scientific and philosophical standards.

ChatGPT can contribute significantly to this process. It can rapidly assemble lines of argument, identify conceptual tensions, compare positions, and produce alternative formulations. It can also help test whether a criticism is fair by presenting the strongest available version of the opposing position.

But it does not automatically know what deserves criticism, which historical detail matters, or when a seemingly plausible answer is misleading. It can make factual errors, overlook context, confuse authors, and produce arguments that sound convincing without being sufficiently supported.

That is why the collaboration requires an active human editor. My role is to determine the subject, establish the critical direction, challenge the machine's responses, correct mistakes, and decide what eventually appears on the website. The final responsibility remains mine.

The Unusual Combination: Senior Experience and Machine Capacity

There is a popular assumption that artificial intelligence is primarily a young person's technology. The age figures suggest that younger adults still account for most ChatGPT messages, but they also show that older users are increasingly participating.

My own case illustrates a potentially productive combination. An older writer may bring decades of accumulated reading, intellectual disputes, editorial experience, and familiarity with the history of a subject. ChatGPT brings speed, breadth, and the ability to generate and reorganize large amounts of text.

Neither contribution is sufficient by itself. Experience without new tools can become repetitive or laborious. Machine-generated fluency without independent judgment can become superficial, overconfident, or derivative. The interesting possibility lies in combining the two.

This also challenges the assumption that older intellectuals are merely consumers of new technology. They can become active experimenters with it, using AI not to replace their accumulated knowledge but to extend the range and pace of their work.

An Editorial Experiment, Not an Abdication of Authorship

The use of AI in publishing raises legitimate questions about authorship and transparency. If ChatGPT contributes substantially to an essay, what exactly is the author's contribution? Is the result a human essay, an AI essay, or a collaboration?

I do not think these questions can be settled simply by counting the words generated by each participant. The more relevant questions concern intellectual direction, selection, verification, criticism, and responsibility. Who decides what the essay is about? Who evaluates the claims? Who corrects the mistakes? Who stands behind the published argument?

In my case, the answer is clear. ChatGPT is a powerful instrument in the production process, but Integral World remains an editorial project shaped by my interests, judgments, and critical commitments. The machine can help construct an argument; it cannot take responsibility for publishing it.

Transparency about the use of AI is important, especially because readers should be able to understand how an essay was produced. But transparency should not be confused with the claim that AI assistance automatically invalidates the intellectual content. The quality of an argument must ultimately be judged by its reasoning and evidence.

Beyond the Statistics

OpenAI's figures tell us something about the changing demographics of ChatGPT use. They show that older users are a small but growing part of the audience, and that their interactions cover a range of practical, informational, and expressive activities.

They do not tell us how many people in the 65+ category are using ChatGPT as a serious intellectual collaborator. Nor do they measure the scale of AI-assisted publishing, the quality of the resulting essays, or the extent to which the technology changes the work of an individual writer.

That leaves an interesting question unanswered: how many older ChatGPT users are doing something comparable to what I am doing with Integral World?

I suspect the number is small, but the available statistics cannot establish it. What they do establish is that my age group represents a relatively small share of ChatGPT activity. My particular way of using the technology is more specialized still.

Integral World has therefore become an experiment in two respects. It continues to examine the claims of integral philosophy and its successors, but it also explores a new way of producing critical intellectual work: an experienced human editor working in sustained collaboration with artificial intelligence.

Perhaps the most interesting lesson is not that a senior citizen has learned to use ChatGPT. It is that a long-running intellectual project can acquire a new lease of life through a technology that makes sustained writing, criticism, and publication considerably more accessible.

The future of AI-assisted intellectual work will not belong exclusively to the young. It may also belong to those who have spent decades accumulating questions worth asking.