AI Policy

An honest AI policy needs to have clearly defined terms. By "AI" I mean generative AI of the sort that is filling the web and world with slop, deskilling people and destroying their cognitive abilities, and encouraging unskilled people to cosplay as skilled professionals. I don't necessarily include other technologies that might reasonably be called AI but hold real promise, such as image classification and guided machine learning. Those technologies pre-date generative AI and are largely irrelevant to this policy, anyway.

I don't use generative AI tools directly to assist with my writing, marketing, the development of this website, or the development of my products. However, this is not a binding policy because it is practically impossible to avoid exposure to generative AI.

I use open source tools like Gimp for image editing and FreeCAD for technical design. (I still use paper and pencil more than CAD.) While these programs may offer AI features or add-ons, now or in the future, I don't use them. Everything I need to do in these areas was possible well before the advent of generative AI and remains possible without generative AI. If any program tries to coerce me into using generative AI, I will be highly incentivized to stop using it.

This website uses Ghost and is hosted on the Ghost Pro service. I don't know to what extent the Ghost team uses AI in the development of their framework and maintenance of their services, but I assume they use it. That's par for the course for software development at this moment in history and I'd be hard pressed to find an alternative that was AI-free. When I say I don't use AI in the development of this website, I mean the development of my Ghost theme and content because that's the only part in which I have a hand.

Finally, I can't reasonably claim that the people and organizations with whom I collaborate, now or in the future, don't and won't use generative AI. The best I can do is to push back when I see generative AI being used for no purpose, and in cases where my likeness or work could be manipulated.