I’ve added a /ai slash page to my blog with my GenAI policy. I’ve excerpted the current contents below:

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Dune by Frank Herbert.

Every word on this blog is handcrafted by me, often painstakingly. I think of writing as an invaluable form of self-expression, and not one that I wish to delegate to a language model. I enjoy collecting new words, and I’m constantly struggling to develop my writing voice*I freely admit that my grammar could really do with some improvement..

Unless otherwise stated, all code snippets are also written from scratch. If I used any textbook or blog resources to inform my code, I’ll attribute it inline.

That’s not to say that I’m a complete luddite.

If I want to learn how something works in more detail, I think using an LLM for rubber-ducking can be an invaluable asset to practice the Socratic method. A lot can be gleaned by cutting down a provided scaffold to its essentials, and through that process coming to understand how it works. I wrote a little bit about that here, but I should probably revisit that post and flesh it out into a mini-essay sometime.

I will also happily delegate HTML, CSS, JS to LLMs. Whilst I’d like to be better at it, design is certainly not my forte. Similarly, I don’t mind using LLMs to generate throw-away shell scripts for data munging and the like.

Lastly, if I respond to your email, rest assured it’s really me and not a bot.

There are many essays that I concur with on the nature of thinking-through-writing and the dangers of AI-induced atrophy. A good place to start is “The machines are fine. I’m worried about us.”