I won't use AI for writing, ever

None of the text on this website, nor any text (English or Japanese) you see online from me will have been written by an AI. This document outlines the three overarching reasons why, each of which individually would be enough justification on their own for me to adopt this policy.

First and foremost, it is wildly disrespectful to expect someone to spend more time reading something than you spent writing and thinking about it. By subjecting people to this rudeness in putting out writing that wasn't written by myself even once and passing it off as my own, I would jeopardize my reputation and personal integrity.

Since the vast majority of people reading this or any of my writing do not have a personal, or even parasocial, relationship with me, this post (and citing it in the footer of my website) acts as a starting point for the trust relationship. Think of this as a way of evening the playing field a bit; I still need to ask for you to trust that everything here is written by myself, but I'm raising the stakes so if I ever am caught lying about this, it harms my reputation that much more.

To whatever extent my writing has value, it's that it provides my perspective in my unique voice. It contains not only facts, conjectures, and opinions, but also embedded in the structure of the text is insight into my thought process. This is similar to when you really get into an author, whether fiction or non-fiction, the more you read of them the more you grow to understand their voice and background and it adds both weight and context to the value within the text.

If you wanted the opinion of whatever the LLM de jour is, you would just prompt it yourself. If you want a sanitized, generic voice summary of some of the points in my post, you can copy-paste this into an LLM and do that yourself, too. If I were to do that step before the text gets to your eyeballs, it's just transcoding between lossy formats.

The vast majority of what I write never makes it out of my own notes, it's one of the ways I come up with and develop ideas. Translating ideas and thoughts to a longform writing forces rethinking some assumptions that are neglected when they're amorphous thoughts in my head.

And when I'm writing, I come out the other side with a better comprehension of the subject matter and a more cohesive collection of thoughts than I had before writing anything down.

Outsourcing the "actually writing" part to an LLM is essentially outsourcing my thinking. For my writing that makes it to a public audience, I'm writing about it precisely because I think I have something worthy to add to the public corpus. In these cases, I am writing to refine these ideas and share them and hopefully provide some utility for someone or spark a discussion that enhances my own understanding.

Putting out slop written by an LLM undermines all of these, and that's why you won't see any of it on this site or anywhere else I post on the internet.