# Reflecting on AI Writing by Nick Radford --- I need to come clean... slightly. My last 3 blog posts, [Theme Lab](/blog/theme-lab), [Your Codebase is Part of the Prompt](/blog/your-codebase-is-part-of-the-prompt), and [How Do You SEO a Tattoo Portfolio Full of Images?](/blog/tattoo-seo) were largely written by AI. That's not to say that I didn't have a hand in the ideation, the structure, or the final delivery, but as I sit here now I'm not sure how I feel about representing those posts as _purely_ my work. We're now living in the era of basically infinite text generation. An LLM can take a prompt and generate something that reads nearly as if a human wrote it, but for the trained eye, it still can fall into that uncanny valley of ai slop writing. I sent [my post around ubiquitous language](/blog/your-codebase-is-part-of-the-prompt) to someone I respect on Twitter back in June and got this feedback: ![](/reflecting-on-ai-writing/image.png) I told him the truth, that I had typed out (well, transcribed VTT) my thoughts and had Codex organize the thoughts and write the first draft before I edited it down further, and I felt okay with that at the time. But looking back 2 months later, it still feels disingenuous. While the ideas were mine, ultimately the content was not truly mine. It was pieced together by GPT 5.5 along with all of its training data to solidify into this work that truly had no author. I think also about how dependent we are on technology as a society along with issues with education and even just the ability to read in younger generations. If I'm unable to put my ideas together in a cohesive way for someone to read, what right to I have to ask them to read it in the first place? Who am I making content for anyway? My blog posts were always smaller helpful posts, like talking about Tailwind's JIT compiler way back in 2021, or the novelty of returning Amazon orders to Whole Foods in 2023, or more freeform posts about my life. I think in the last couple months I've been trying to use my blog as a means of expanding my reach on the internet with the end goal of showing myself as a competent engineer and find a full time job. While I am more confident in my technical abilities these days than probably ever before, the latter hasn't necessarily worked out yet, and trying to sell my AI written blog posts as my own writing plays in the face of those very people I'm trying to communicate better with. ## Catalyst I had a call with Trevor O'Leary, the cofounder of [Uplift](https://uplift.us), a microhousing solution for first responders, disaster housing relief, and consumers. I saw they were hiring, read through their website and since they didn't have a proper job listing, just a contact us form, I wrote to them and included a small story at the top related to housing. > I saw a post on X about Uplift and I was intrigued, and reading the manifesto and vision on the website here paints a very interesting picture of a company that might actually be able to move the needle on housing here in the US. My parents bought their home in a suburb of Cincinnati in the early 90's for like 60k, and in 30 years, a very similar house on the block I grew up on is going for 4x that. New housing costs are skyrocketing, and most people my age will likely never own their own home with how the current economics are going. Trevor said something to the effect of "Thanks for sharing that story at the top of your email, it didn't seem like AI wrote it so that's why I reached out, you can't believe what my inbox looks like right now". That struck me. Made me really think of what kind of effect taking the time to write something human down instead of relying on an AI to make something just good-enough in the moment, and what kinds of doors that can really open. ## Going Forward I'm going to make a few changes here. - I'm going to update the three posts to mark them as largely written / edited by AI. - I will get around to rewriting them from scratch eventually, when I have less immediate things to take care of. - I will not write future blog posts with AI. - I will continue to use AI in developing apps, products, even my own website, but not the content within the sites that I assign my name to.