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AI Disclosure: My Blog Posts and Other Projects

At By Zola Gonano

I use AI a lot in my day-to-day life, mostly for personal research and quick questions, or to write code for things that I’m not going to publish online as Free and Open Source Software and I’m too lazy to write them myself.

What I don’t use it for is my blog posts, books, and public coding projects, and the reason is very simple: I respect everyone who reads these posts and books or uses my projects, and I highly appreciate their time, and I can’t bring myself to wasting their time with AI-generated slop. Even if it takes much more time and effort on my side and they don’t turn out perfect.

Besides that, the internet, and especially personal and technical blogs, used to be our own independent publications where everything we wrote had a piece of our opinions in them. We were putting a part of our consciousness out there, and nowadays it’s just AI-generated slop to gain fame or followers quickly.

So, obviously, that’s not something that I’d like to contribute to. That’s why this blog will remain AI (semi)-free and ad-free.

Semi-free because I do use AI in my books, blogs, and even code, but not in a generative sense. Here are my reasons and how I use AI for them:

  • I am not a native English speaker. Even though I am fluent at it now, I still make mistakes, especially in grammar. So after I finish writing my blog posts or a book chapter, I use AI to fix my typos and grammar errors, which, besides saving me so much time, also allows me to focus purely on writing and not care about minor grammar errors or typos. And this is the exact prompt I use:

    "FIX MY GRAMMAR ERRORS AND TYPOS ONLY, DO NOT CHANGE THE CONTENT OR MY TONE AND DO NOT ADD OR REMOVE ANY INFORMATION"

    Then I do a quick review to make sure it has done exactly that, and then I publish.

  • Also, I sometimes get stuck when researching and reading documents and codebases, or I get exhausted if there are too many, and I use an AI with a deep research feature to help me with researching.

  • I do not write or architect my code with AI, but it’s nice to use AI to improve what’s already written, especially security-wise. (Also, I sometimes let AI write my code’s documentation when I have already explained to it what it should EXACTLY write.)

If anything has been AI-generated (most likely personal scripts that I have decided to publish), I will explicitly state that.

Why Did I Explain All This?

Because everyone who’s reading or using my works deserves this level of transparency about how those are made. And I believe a lot more people should be open about that, as it’s becoming harder and harder to distinguish between what’s human-generated and what’s AI-generated.

I personally like to read imperfect and flawed articles and books that someone actually put thought and energy into rather than something someone generated to farm views and chase money.