Last week, I wrote about why I don’t and won’t use AI to help me get through grad school. Afterward, I realized that although I have a personal AI policy for my site, I’ve never actually stated it here. So here’s the short version:
Absolutely no writing on this site is done with AI of any kind.
I don’t use AI writing assistants at all, not even Grammarly or other “innocent and useful” helpers. The only time I’ve ever even whiffed AI on this site was in some early posts, and that was to help with the title only. I very shortly gave up on even using that because while it is very good at coming up with catchy titles, I don’t write posts to be catchy. I want you to read the posts here because they’re useful, interesting, or thought-provoking, not because they were SEO-optimized to attract clicks. I hate it when people waste my time with clickbait AI slop, and I wouldn’t do the same to you.
By the way, if you see an em dash in my posts, they don’t come from AI. An em dash is a useful marker for a pause or a shift that’s bigger than a comma but doesn’t reach period level. I’ve always used em dashes—in fact, I use them so much I’ve known for years that the Alt code for one is 0151 and I can type it without even looking. (See what I did there?)
However, there is a place where I do use AI on this site: images. The vast majority of the featured images for these posts are AI generated. I use the images to reflect the writing, not the other way around. They’re decoration; posts could go without images at all. In some cases, AI can generate images that couldn’t be done in real life, such as the featured image for “Dig While You Write.” After all, no sane librarian would let you bring a shovel into the stacks.
This policy is the same one I have for my novels. Everything I’ve ever written goes from my head to my fingertips to a word processor with no stops in between. After all, to turn a saying on its head, why should you be bothered to read something I couldn’t be bothered to write? That’s why I write every single word myself, all the way from word 1 to word 200,000.
To sum up my AI policy in four words:
- Writing, never.
- Images, probably.
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