/ai

Generative AI has its uses and, yes, I do use it, but not in the actual writing of 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.

AI labels

From September 2026, I'm starting to label posts in the footer with one of these three symbols from ai-label.org:

	No AI used I have not used any AI tool in the planning of, drafting, or writing of the article.
	Assisted by AI I have used an AI tool in the preparation of this article, but not to create the actual content you see.
	Made with AI Some or all of the content on the page was generated by AI.

Alongside the symbol, where AI has been used, I'll list the categories of use. At the moment, these are:

• Inspiration
  I may have used GenAI to create an outline, research a topic, or suggest ideas.
• Proofreading
  I have given a GenAI tool a draft of my post for it to check for errors and inconsistencies. I have then taken that feedback to re-draft the post myself without just copy-pasting the response.
• Editing
  I have allowed GenAI to make its own edits to my post.
• Copy writing
  I have used the actual output of GenAI in the article.
• Image generation
  I have used a GenAI tool to edit, manipulate or create an image used in the post.
• Other
  Something else not covered above.

No AI
used in this article.