AI Use

I use AI tools in my writing and my work. I think that deserves a clear explanation, because transparency matters to me and because it is past time to have a productive conversation about AI and creative endeavours.

I say this as someone with a degree in English and a career in software engineering. Both happen to be among the fields most disrupted by AI. The irony is not lost on me. Maintaining a clear sense of authorship and voice, the proverbial authenticity so many seek, and too often counterintuitively contrive, is the only way through. That will require a mix of flexibility, intellectual curiosity, creative risk, and a tolerance for uncertainty. Writing this out loud is as much a reminder to myself as it is anything else.

The ideas on this site are mine. The framing, the arguments, the angles, the 0-to-1 thinking. I shape all of that before a model sees any of it. I come to the page with a perspective, not a prompt looking for one. What I believe, what I'm skeptical of, what I find worth saying are not things I outsource.

Where AI earns its keep is in the work that follows. It's a pretty rigorous editor where there was none before. It catches where my argument loses its thread, where a sentence is doing too much, where I've said something twice without realizing it. I push back, it pushes back, and the writing gets tighter. That is a genuinely useful creative partnership, an accelerant.

It is also useful for research. It helps me stress test my arguments, moving them from opinion to, hopefully, a better and more well informed argument. When I make a claim, I want to know whether it holds up.

The same applies to code. AI has become a genuine pair programming partner. It accelerates the work I already know how to do and helps me explore territory I'm less familiar with. The architecture, the decisions, the judgment about what to build and why remain mine. The fundamentals still matter. Knowing your tools well enough to direct them is different from letting them run.

I don't think any of this diminishes the work. A writer who uses a great editor is still a writer. A developer who uses powerful tools is still an engineer. The thinking is the work. The tools serve the thinking.

What I try to avoid: using AI to generate ideas I haven't had, to construct arguments I don't believe, or to produce volume for its own sake. That way leads to work that sounds like something but isn't anything.

Distinguishing AI-generated content from human writing will only get harder. This page exists to help you, the reader, understand how I work and where I lean on these tools to get ideas out the door. If you ever have questions about how something specific was produced, ask. I'd rather have that conversation than leave it ambiguous.