Some believe that using AI for writing articles is lazy, not creative, and that you don’t earn the credit for doing it. I disagree. Or, it depends. Here’s a personal experiment.
This week, I shared an article about digital sovereignty with my professional network on LinkedIn. Even if I used ChatGPT to write the article, I spent days on it, or, more specifically, I spent days creating and testing different prompts. The article was written in French, then later translated into English and shared on my blog (see “On Digital Sovereignty and Strategic Realism”).
In this meta blog post, I want to share the final prompt that led to the article. Please note that the final response from ChatGPT was manually modified before being posted. Here’s the prompt below followed with some comments.
I would like you to write an article of no more than 1500 words on the topic of digital sovereignty, a subject that is currently highly relevant both in Québec and around the world. This article will be read by information technology and cybersecurity professionals. It should offer a clear-eyed perspective on the issues and challenges related to the pursuit of digital sovereignty for organizations and governments. The article should not be alarmist, but realistic and critical, with the goal of prompting reflection among readers.
Here is how the article should be structured: an introductory section that provides context, followed by a section explaining why digital sovereignty is essential but not a fully realistic target in absolute terms; we must remain pragmatic. Then, a section offering potential solutions or realistic strategies that large organizations should adopt, especially if they are critical to society.
The article should conclude with open questions inviting readers to reflect and comment in order to spark a constructive conversation. Use the following elements to build the article. Reuse the provided links as references.
- Over the past five years, a series of international, political, and technological events has forced us to examine the notion of digital sovereignty (a few examples: the rise of the GAFAM giants, the Snowden affair, the U.S. Patriot Act and Cloud Act, recent U.S. elections, mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector, etc.).
- What exactly is digital sovereignty? “Digital sovereignty refers to the ability of a state, an organization, or an individual to control and manage its data, digital infrastructures, and technologies in order to ensure its strategic autonomy and security in the digital space.”
- It is the ability to fully exercise one’s rights and choices in the digital domain without being subject to external constraints.
- Major outages from several cloud service providers have occurred, the most notable being:
- AWS (October 20, 2025: Revealing the Cascading Impacts of the AWS Outage – Ookla)
- A Microsoft Azure outage (October 29, 2025: Microsoft Azure Outage: How the World’s Second-Largest Cloud Platform Went Down – ThinkCloudly)
- And more recently, a Cloudflare outage (November 18, 2025: Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025)
- Another outage occurred last year, on July 19, 2024, when a problematic update from CrowdStrike caused widespread service failures (2024 CrowdStrike-related IT outages – Wikipedia)
- These outages strongly remind us of our deep dependence on cloud services and technology in general, both personally and within organizations.
- We need to reflect and attempt to find viable answers and strategies to these questions: Are we well prepared? Do mitigation solutions exist? Is digital sovereignty only about data?
- Is digital sovereignty a mirage? Are we not always dependent on something beyond our control? We must keep in mind that:
- Complexity and cost: Developing sovereign solutions (cloud, software, artificial intelligence) requires massive investments.
- Global interdependence: Digital value chains are globalized, making total autonomy difficult, if not impossible.
- Risk of protectionism: Some fear that digital sovereignty could be used as a pretext for trade barriers.
- Clearly, digital sovereignty is not merely about using or not using cloud computing, or choosing which cloud to use; it is much broader than that.
- I really like this quote, and it must be integrated into the article: “Digital sovereignty is neither a luxury nor a technological gimmick. It is a pillar of resilience and democracy.” — Le Devoir: https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/936699/parlons-souverainete
- I believe we need to accept the fact that we will never have full control over our digital destiny. Therefore, we must adopt mitigation and exit strategies to reduce dependency links.
- We must maintain a message of independence toward major industry players so that they understand they are not alone, even if they are powerful. We need to be strategic, give ourselves the means to stay agile, and diversify.
As you can see, the prompt is nearly as long as the final product. It took me a dozen tries to see what ChatGPT could create. After each try, I would modify and add instructions to the prompt. Oh, and I searched for references myself. In short, this was a multi-day effort. Am I a lazy guy? You tell me.
