I feel like this shouldn’t have to be said, but there are many things that I feel like shouldn’t be as they are and this is one of them: Every sentence on this site is written by hand. I believe that using AI for writing would be disrespectful to the readers of this site by wasting their time.
I am not an opponent of AI. On the contrary, I use AI nearly every day at work and on private projects. It’s an incredibly useful tool for software engineering and knowledge work in general. For example, the software powering this blog and its design have seen many improvements through the help of AI. I also use it to review what I wrote, and that helps me to correct and improve the texts I write.
So is “written without AI” a lie? I don’t believe it is. To me, writing is the translation of thoughts into words so that another human can understand the thought. AI is a tool that can help with this by pointing out problems where this translation process doesn’t work, but it’s impossible to outsource this process to an AI.
However, every tool can be used in harmful ways. AI is so easy to misuse, and the misuse so prevalent, that we have a word for it: Slop. Slop can be generated cheaply (as in not requiring a lot of human time), it looks great at first glance, and it’s often as empty as a glass full of air.
Slop seems to exploit our brain’s conditioning to associate a well-written text with actual thought. At the rate AI is being used today, this conditioning won’t last long and the next generation growing up with Slop will learn not to trust text implicitly.
Which brings us to why I had to write this. Using AI has a slippery-slope problem. You start by using a little of it and all of a sudden, you’re using it for everything. This page is not for you, dear reader. This page is to stop me from using AI for writing by publicly committing to writing by hand.