Ozy Brennan recently wrote an article about dynomight recently writing an article calling for writers to issue public statements about AI use.
Like Ozy I think this is a good idea. Mainly because the act of writing is akin to a sacrament to me. It is a communion between a portion of the idealized soul of the author with the soul of a reader in the future, and the idea that this communion would be defiled by the touch of a parasitic slop-mind actually makes me feel physical revulsion.1
I take the 99% Dynomight Pledge. The Dynomight Pledge is I “guarantee that every word I post here is the product of me physically hitting keys with my fingers. The only exceptions would be quotes from other humans or something that’s clearly labeled as an AI output.”2
I add to this “or the product of my voice speaking into a microphone and then being transcribed, plus a fingers-hitting-keys editing pass” like yesterday’s post.
Why 99%?
I sometimes use AI as a powerful thesaurus when the right word is at the edge of my brain but I don’t want to sit for two minutes to catch it. eg: “defiled” above was the result of “synonyms for "soiled" that have religious connotations” in GPT.
I use AI for research, especially to find a link to a source I didn’t write down, or to fact-check something. Sometimes I will copy-paste bits from the AI chat window.
I use AI as a proof-reader for about 50% of posts. This mainly catches typos. I ignore the majority of its suggestions because they always push to homogenized LinkedIn-voice, but when it catches a “that” which was supposed to be a “than” for the 5th time I really am grateful these bots exist.3
Also I use AI for things that aren’t writing because those things aren’t very sacred to me. I use it for coding, I use it for office tasks and data juggling, I’d use it for graphs. I used to use AI-generated images all the time, and I still do every now and then when I think they’ll add to a post. Actually if a certain personality test is to be believed, I simply prefer AI art to human-created art on a basic aesthetic level, which is probably worth writing more about later.
Anyway, TLDR: Everything I write is written by me. I find the thought of AI writing repulsive. If this changes in the future, I will let you know. But probably I would have been replaced by a body-snatching alien if this has actually happened. Which, I guess, kinda means you have to hope that this alien has enough integrity to let you know it’s ditching the Dynomight Pledge despite having snatched my body. Seems unlikely. What I’m saying is, if you see AI writing here get your hot filament test warmed up.
To the guys at the Unslop Prize, I love you and I’m glad someone is doing this. Please understand this is a religious sentiment on my part and not pliable by reason.
The words in this color in this post were copy-pasted from Ozy’s post. No, I will not be color-coding things I copy-paste from a source I’m linking in future posts, it is for demonstrative purposes here, so one knows what one can expect from me.
In this post it caught “personality-test” and “a” rather than “an.” These were two of ten suggested corrections, I ignored the rest because they stripped personality. FWIW, the prompt I use is: Please read the following post and create a bullet list of any spelling or grammatical errors. Technical errors or blatant errors of fact that you see are also to be noted. Quote the entire sentence wherever there is an error, and suggest a correction. Do not suggest stylistic improvements, word choice changes, or rephrasings unless the original is grammatically incorrect or factually wrong. You are proof reading only, not editing for content.
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