AI Usage

I do not use AI to write any of the copy intended for human consumption on this website. This website has an llms.txt file which is entirely LLM-generated. I have enjoyed the em dash since I was in high school and continue to use it where I deem appropriate.

What I do use AI for:

• In blog posts and wiki entries, the IEEE bibliographies are often¹ generated from a list of URLs that I personally curate. I read all of the source literature that I cite and I manually inspect the resulting bibliography text as part of my usual due diligence process prior to publication.
• Prior to submission to a human proofreader (overwhelmingly a trusted friend or colleague but sometimes an internet stranger), I will feed drafts to LLMs in an iterative fashion. This is aimed at catching:
  • Typos
  • Factual inaccuracies (e.g., in mathematical definitions)
  • Prose inconsistencies (e.g., I jump around in the text during writing)
  • Content gaps (i.e., what more should I say?)
• I sometimes take a picture of a hand-drawn diagram (either on paper or a whiteboard) and provide this to an LLM in order to produce either a Mermaid diagram or an SVG.

Personally, I am not against AI/LLMs and make great use of them as part of my day job as well as side projects. I think that they can have a vastly accelerative effect on the raw speed at which various aspects of knowledge work can be done and can provide enormous amounts of leverage to software projects in particular. With this being said, I feel that it is extremely intellectually dishonest to present LLM-derived text as one's own writing in the public sphere (i.e., don't post slop). I also use writing as a means to educate myself and harden my understanding of the concepts that I write about—so it would betray myself to simply publish slop. This part in particular is more nuanced than simply slop posting; it's exactly the most tempting to have an LLM fill in a single gap in an article when it is the part that requires the most careful study in order to patch our own understanding!