The Human Advantage: A Novelist, a Chef, and Two Very Different Views of AI
What happens when you put an author who wants AI nowhere near her writing in the same conversation with a chef and publisher who has given his AI a name, a personality, and a place in his business?
Jason Wade talks with novelist Joni Marie Iraci and Chef Dennis Littley about creativity, authorship, food, publishing, search, reinvention, and where the human advantage survives as AI gets better.
Joni explains why AI-generated writing and editing bother her, why the human element still matters, and how real research feeds her Vatican thrillers.
Dennis takes almost the opposite position. He describes treating ChatGPT less like a vending machine and more like a working partner, using it to organize recipes, develop ideas, work through projects, and expand what he can accomplish.
The conversation also gets into publishing, SEO, building an audience, Italian food, the Vatican, Dan Brown, Anthony Bourdain, Florida, robots, and why expertise still matters when machines can generate almost anything.
The real question underneath the conversation:
If AI can reproduce the output, what still makes the human worth finding?
Joni Marie Iraci
Joni Marie Iraci is a novelist and former registered nurse whose second career took her through Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Her Vatican thriller Vatican Daughter combines historical research with conspiracy fiction, and her next novel, Women of a Lesser God, continues the series.
She is decidedly skeptical of AI replacing human writers, editors, judgment, and creative nuance.
Chef Dennis Littley
Dennis Littley, known online as Ask Chef Dennis, is a classically trained chef, culinary educator, recipe publisher, and longtime digital creator. He turned a blog originally created for his culinary students into a major food publishing business with more than 1,200 recipes.
Dennis has become an aggressive AI adopter, using ChatGPT across business planning, publishing, recipe workflows, creative projects, and new product development while maintaining that human experience and judgment remain essential.
Jason T Wade is the founder of BackTier and an AI Visibility Architect helping companies become discoverable, correctly understood, cited, included, and recommended across AI systems including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, and Google AI.
He specializes in AI SEO, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), entity architecture, structured data, citation infrastructure, and the technical signals that influence how AI systems classify and recommend brands.
Through BackTier, Jason builds AI Visibility systems around the recommendation path:
Citation → Inclusion → Selection
Joni Marie Iraci
https://jonimarieiraci.com
Ask Chef Dennis
https://www.askchefdennis.com
BackTier
https://BackTier.com
Jason Wade
https://JasonWade.com
BackTier Media — AI Visibility · GEO · AEO · AI SEO
