/ai

Generative AI has its uses and, yes, I do use it, but not in my blog posts.

Almost all of my posts are deeply personal - family history, things I find interesting, things about me - all of which (I hope!) a GenAI couldn't write. 

I don't use GenAI to speak for me. What you read and see in my blog posts, including images and other media, are AI-free.

So, where do I use GenAI?

GenAIs should, at most, be used as an assistive tool - and that's how I use it. I occasionally use it (by 'it' I mean Anthropic's Claude), to work out an outline structure if I'm struggling to piece things together, but that's as close to the posts as it's getting.

Where I have really used it on the site is to fix things that were bugging me. Like, I wasn't happy with the switching between my dark and light mode themes, so got Claude to integrate the two and bring in auto-detection. I'd also found that the integration I was using to show Pixelfed images was breaking and, whilst I could have figured it out myself, Claude was able to get things going again in minutes.

I'm not naïve. I was writing programs in BASIC for the BBC Micro when I was a kid. I hand-wrote my first websites in the late 90s when I was a teenager. I've dabbled in Javascript, PHP, Python...

What I'm saying is, I'm not afraid to learn how to do these things, but when there's a tool that can help and, in turn, help you learn, then why not try it? I also know enough to spot when things won't work, or when they may even be dangerous, before I run them.

In short: yes, I do use GenAI in the background, but not in my blog content.