How I use AI

I linked this article by JA Westenberg in my last linkdump, and in it she mentions that she has a "How I AI" section on the about page of her blog. A different post I read this week talks about the authenticity of digital art in an age where everybody can just slop generate everything with a few prompts. And then there's this line I read somewhere, I forgot where: "If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it". And so I thought I'd put together my thoughts on AI usage on this site.

Plain and simple, this is a blog written by a human for humans. This means that everything you read here has been written by me (with a few exceptions in the past that I'm not going to repeat going forward ¹).

I don't use AI to generate ideas, I don't use AI to write posts or generate images or write code.

I use a few tools though, and some might be or are AI powered:

• Spell check and grammar check. I write in Obsidian and use the integrated spell checker and recently started using Harper as a grammar checker. I don't think that's AI powered, but I'm not 100% sure. In any case it just makes suggestions, but doesn't write for me.
• I'm not a native English speaker, so if a sentence just doesn't feel right to me and I can't get it to sound right, I might put it into an AI writing assistant to see how it reformulates that sentence. This happens maybe once every handful of posts. In that case the ideas and words are still mine, but AI helped to make it more readable.
• I don't use AI to generate code, but I sometimes use it instead of using a search engine for looking something up. For example, if I don't remember how to split a string at a particular delimiter in python, instead of putting that into google a search engine that isn't horrible and reading through Substack posts, I might also put it into AI as a prompt ("How to split a string in python by a delimiter") and use this as a lazy way to get the answer instead of searching through the python docs. I have had the experience though that this can give me subtly wrong answers, so on a number of occasions I've also given up on this approach and just did what I should have done from the start - read the docs. (I use duck.ai, because I don't know anything else and that at least promises some privacy protection)

And that's it. So in short, this blog is written by me and what you see and read here comes out of my own brain. When I use AI, I use it the same way I would "use" a person sitting next to me - to ask it a question when I'm stuck and see if it can help me out. I think that's an acceptable way to use it.