I'm not using AI for personal writing or art, here's why

First, a disclaimer. I work as a Lead UX Designer, and do use LLMs and AI assisted features extensively in my day to day work. So if you're engaging with me professionally or are considering doing so - don't worry, I am keeping up with these tools.

I'm just choosing to not use them for personal writing (such as this site), personal communication, imagery or art. Every painting, illustration, page, blog post or letter you see or read on this site is written or made by me personally, without the assistance of AI.

The main reason is that when I consume any piece of media published by a person, I assume it was created by that person unless told otherwise. This was a fair assumption to make most of the time until recently. Yes plagiarism and ghost writers and brands posing as or funding individuals have all been things for a while, but there's usually not much reason to expect that a post on a person's personal blog wasn't written by them - why wouldn't it be? And whilst that means human errors and imperfect writing, it's real and that's the point. Reading a story or looking at a painting or listening to a song is entering a dialog with the author or artist, and even if it is at a distance of time and space it's still engaging with another human being at a human level.

So when I've been reading an email newsletter for a while and then find out that the author is using AI to generate most of it, I feel duped and honestly a little hurt. And although they explained their reasoning and it did make sense (the newsletter was about technology and AI after all), it made me lose interest in their writing entirely. I do read a lot of generated content at work, but I engage with it very differently to content written by humans - more extractive, mining for the useful facts to figure out the true intent behind the AI padding. I'm more likely to seek an AI summary of AI generated content, which I would never do for personal writing - what would be the point?

I hate having to always evaluate what is or isn't real anymore. And I don't want anyone to have to do that when coming to my site or receiving my email newsletters. So please be assured that it's just me behind this site, flaws and all.