I promise, all posts are human written (for the most part)

You will not find a single — (em dash) in my blogs. To me it has become symptomatic of "AI slop" [1] and that's not how I'd like to do things here.

I will be honest: generative AI has been a big productivity win for me. I use it professionally and personally for everything from programming to writing emails to acting as a cooking assistant.

... that said, here is my promise: the content on this blog will be human written, for the most part.

To make this concrete, you'll get my initial draft [2], what AI proposed to change it [3] to this and finally the piece you're reading right now. Let me know which one you prefer the most!

Why I am making that promise

if the writer hasn't put in the effort, why would I put in the effort to read it myself?

I believe that due to the proliferation of AI writing we've ended up with a lot of soulless, same-ish content.

I might be projecting, but I really don't like reading clearly AI generated copy. I believe in writing things I would personally enjoy reading.

Some GenAI still went into writing this blog post (and all the others you'll read here) but mostly to speed up the process of writing.

I will still use GenAI as a ...

Sanity checker

The first thing I do before writing a blog post is a sanity check. Sometimes I have bad ideas, and I use GenAI to kill them early.

If the idea survives the "AI check", I typically ask it to give me some (human-written) content I can read to ground and inform myself better before writing.

Reorderer

Generally I like using a clear narrative structure of:

Hook
1 to 3 clear issues
My take or solution to the above, summarized
Body
Recap

As you'll see in the first draft [4], I try and produce the entire blog post in a single sitting. The result is a messy document with conflicting and rough ideas.

I use GenAI to reorder and restructure content to land on text that is more pleasant to read. The key point: the content and style stays mine, just reordered.

Spelling & grammar checker

I write markdown in Obsidian [5]. It has a pretty good spell checker, but mistakes do still creep. It mostly corrects spelling, but not grammar, structure or incorrectly used terms.

GenAI also helped making the text flow better, adding some more linking words. Making long sentences shorter, and shorter sentences longer.

You'll notice the original is way more start-stop than what you're reading now.

Summary

In short, my promise is that most of what you'll read here, for better or for worse, is written by myself (with a sprinkle of GenAI's help). That's why you'll never find an em dash here, but you'll certainly find a run-on sentence or two.