No AI Writing
AI tools are becoming increasingly popular, and many people are using them to write software, blogs, books, all kinds of things.
I do use some of these tools (primarily Copilot autocomplete; sometimes ChatGPT) to assist with engineering and design, as well as for limited research assistance. (I could elaborate, but “how I use AI”-style articles are a dime a dozen nowadays, and I probably don’t have anything novel to add)
However, I do not use AI for writing. All of the written content on my websites (my personal website, my blog, READMEs, etc) is written and edited solely by me (or by me + contributors, in the case of open source projects). This is a personal guarantee of mine.
Why?
If you’re really interested, I can elaborate (but feel free to skip):
Though my educational background is, on its face, solely STEM, I actually spent a significant amount of time in college—and, before then, high school—learning to write. A childhood as a voracious reader (especially Pratchett and Adams, authors known for their ways with words) didn’t hurt, either.
I’ve realized over the course of my career that good engineering is actually 80% writing (perhaps even more), and that it’s beneficial to be able to communicate effectively via text. I believe inserting AI into the middle of this cannot possibly add any clarity; it can only reduce it or muddle things up (especially as content often goes through multiple rounds of AI, with automatic summaries appearing everywhere).
So… If you’re ever reading my writing – be it a post, an email, a letter, anything – please trust that I actually wrote it. And yes, sometimes that means using em-dashes/en-dashes. I’m quite inclined to parentheticals, and footnotes, however amusing in Discworld books, are usually less practical in day-to-day correspondence. I don’t expect I’ll ever naturally write “It’s not X, it’s Y” or “No X. No Y. Just Z.”, though!
This is not to say that I consider myself to be a perfect writer, or even a great one. But, as with many human endeavors, I am trying to continually improve, and having AI think/write for me wouldn’t help me out at all.
A definitely-not-AI tell of mine (though not visibly rendered in HTML) is double-spacing between sentences. Even though I grew up just past the age of needing to use a typewriter, two spaces just logically make sense. What’s the downside to differentiating between a break between sentences vs. a period that happens to occur inside a sentence (such as “P.S.” or “U.S.A.”, or even the “vs.” I just used)? (I’ll also often use the non-US-style of keeping punctuation outside of quotation marks…that’s likely the engineer in me, because why would you ever include something inside a quotation that’s not actually part of the quotation??)
Ah, look at me, I’m ramblin’ again (to quote Sam Elliott in an excellent film)…
If you have any concerns that any particular piece of writing I’ve produced was created or rewritten by AI, please reach out. I can assure you that it was not—but if my writing sounds like AI, then I might need to make some changes myself!
(One last note: this doesn’t apply to my writing in languages other than English. For these, I will have composed the original text myself, but I am not fluent enough in any language (other than maaaaybe Spanish) to be able to write without some level of assistance)
— Nick Aldwin, January 2026