Because generative AI is in everything now, a shockingly high number of other blogs have adopted it, and, on Reddit, other people have occasionally accused my comments on that platform of being AI-generated, I’ve decided to make this short post clarifying my own position regarding its use.
I began writing this blog in November 2016, long before the emergence of generative AI. I write every post I make on this blog entirely myself, and it takes me many hours to research, write, and edit each post. I’m sure that, if I did use generative AI, then I could produce many more posts in far less time, but I don’t want to do that. I want every post on this blog to be as accurate as possible and to reflect my own actual thoughts, and I believe that using generative AI would compromise both of these goals. Moreover, I still firmly believe that presenting AI-generated content as one’s own work without disclosure is intellectually dishonest, despite how normalized it has become in the past three years.
The only place where I have ever knowingly used generative AI for anything on this blog is in my February 2023 post about how ChatGPT is unreliable for both translating ancient languages and finding information about ancient history and literature. In that post, I quoted passages of text generated by ChatGPT so that I could explain why those passages were factually incorrect or misleading.
I do realize that I sometimes have a “Wikipedia voice” that can sound like generative AI. That is just how I sound sometimes; this is partly a result of my academic background and partly a result of the fact that I first began writing online by editing Wikipedia in the 2010s. Other features of my writing can sometime lead people to think I am using AI. Notably, my vocabulary includes some large, academic-sounding, and unusual words, and I regularly use both em dashes and semicolons. I have been using these since before generative AI existed, and I plan to continue using them, even though some people tend to assume that any writing that includes these punctuation marks is AI-generated.
Finally, in case I need to say it, I do not use AI-generated images for this blog either. I primarily include images in my posts for educational purposes, and I do not consider AI-generated images to have any educational value for discussions about the premodern past. In fact, AI-generated images and videos that purport to depict scenes from history or historical figures are invariably wildly inaccurate. The images I use on this blog are primarily photos of real artifacts, inscriptions, and historical artistic depictions. When discussing popular culture, I sometimes include screenshots from works of media that I am discussing.
In the meantime, I am currently working on a detailed review of Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, which I saw in the theater last Friday. I am hoping to publish my review within the next few days.
Really looking forward to the review! And thank you for not using AI.
Getting accused of using AI when that’s just how you talk is peak autism
Re “Moreover, I still firmly believe that presenting AI-generated content as one’s own work without disclosure is intellectually dishonest, despite how normalized it has become in the past three years.”
Agree completely. Plagiarism is plagiarism whether from another person or from an AI.
My practice is to not use any AI tools, although I found myself unknowingly using Google AI summaries, which I attributed, but I also no longer use them as a source (a guide to other sites, maybe).
Agreed that using AI without disclosing it is plagiarism.
Well said! And important to say it. It’s a shame that good writing these days is assumed to be fake! That says a lot of (bad) things about our society.