I use OpenAI and similar tools mostly for research in my academic, creative, and professional lives. This is similar to my use of search engines and “old school” academic research tools, and I use the various AI/LLM tools in that way.

I enjoy the challenge of writing myself. It’s organized thinking. It’s the doing I’m after, not having it done, especially in creative work.

– Derek Silvers, and I concur.

I have never ever used AI to generate text in place of my “voice”. Not in emails. No sentences in my school work or blog posts or even on-line comments (when I make them). Nothing pretending to be me.

I use AI in proof reading and editing, such as to to help me maintain a consistent tense (future, past perfect, &c.), a particular weakness of my writing. This is similar to using an automated spell checker and grammar checker in a word processor.

I use AI to generate programming functions for me — in Emacs elisp, Python, Lua, as examples — for educational purposes, which I’ve then adapted to include in my own code. I’ve also used it in professional work as a cybersecurity consultant. But that was for technical work as required by my employers. The industry moved quickly in that direction.

Nothing claiming to be written by me is written by an AI.

If this changes in the future, I’ll update this page.

This page is based on the one Derek Sivers wrote, based on the one Damola wrote (his AI Manifesto is worth reading). Some of the wording above is inspired by or comes from them until I re-write this more for myself.